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by krapp 475 days ago
> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.

I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.
3 comments
evanjrowley 474 days ago
Today I explained to a sales engineer working at a Fortune 500 company how to open an Incognito window in Google Chrome.

Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being less capable of identifying common file formats. Computer illiteracy has been snowballing ever since.

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sirl1on 474 days ago
Nitpick: I think known file extensions where hidden in Explorer since at least Windows 95

https://www.brainbell.com/tutors/A+/Hardware/Managing_Files_...

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sylens 474 days ago
The inflection point was iOS
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krapp 474 days ago
It didn't take deep technical skill and knowledge to build a Geocities website in the 1990s though, and most people who did were minimally computer literate. I feel like you're conflating issues here.
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erikerikson 474 days ago
As opposed to having Hacker News accounts ;P
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bolognafairy 475 days ago
because they don’t use neovim
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