[Hard_Space]

> 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works.

I think this is a bit outdated. I'll be 60 in a month, and have been practicing and writing about machine learning, for money, for a straight 10 years now; and I was a young man (and a full stack developer) during the digital revolution.

If anything, GenX had to work harder to get into these brittle emerging technologies and paradigms. There's no-one of my age group, at least that I know of, who is remotely as tech-illiterate as your comment depicts.

Truth is that it took so long for smartphones to dumb down everyone's tech acumen that those of my generation had already learned to do it the hard way.

[dijksterhuis]

> practicing and writing about machine learning ... full stack developer ... digital revolution.

my mum, a boomer now in her 70s, would have no bloody clue what you're talking about. she used to work helping out a guy who was doing punchcard programming back when she was young. she ain't dumb. if i broke it down into normal human english words, she'd probably get a sort of idea (or at least nod along to humour me).

i've lost count of the number of conversations i've had with my dad, late 70s boomer, where he complains that they've changed the UI. "It's all different and i don't understand, why did they have to change it? I don't know where anything is now." he's been moaning about things like this for over a decade now (so since his late 60s).

there are definitely technically not-very-literate 60 year olds and the general point about older folks, whether that's >60 or >70, is very real:

older people exist who don't have a clue about SPAs/PWAs, and chances are they're either asking their offspring for help (my mum does this), trying to phone someone instead (my mum does this) or just walking away from it (my mum does this).

[Maken]

To be fair, the UI randomly changing in every update is a pain point for people of any age.

[motoboi]

Some people know how to fix a fridge.

[rewgs]

GP clearly isn’t talking about 60 year olds who were full stack devs and get on Hacker News.

[tomgp]

60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life. Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.

[lproven]

> 60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life.

Absolutely. I am in full-time work, and expect to be for another decade. I have worked my entire career in IT, doing tech support, training, systems design and implementation, tech journalism, and tech writing (i.e. documentation).

I will be 60 in less than 18 months.

> Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.

You did say "at least", but still... longer than that.

I started work in 1988 and they were already ubiquitous in my world. Richer companies had the fairly newfangled IBM compatibles, which were still big and expensive. The cheap Amstrad PCs were just starting to appear.

Older hands had multiuser boxes with SCO Xenix or DR Concurrent CP/M or Concurrent DOS and a bunch of dumb terminals. My company had switched to these from Alpha Micro systems running AMOS -- and again, dumb terminals. One of my clients had a DEC PDP-11.

The real old hands had 8-bit kit: some CP/M, and a few BBC Micros.

The first big migrations I saw were from standalone (or multiuser) PCs to LANs, and from pre-PC systems to PCs and Macs.

[bsammon]

That would be "60 year olds who have been office workers most of their working life"

60-year-olds who worked blue-collar for a significant part of their life, this is not so obviously true for.

Also probably not true for 60-year-olds who worked in other non-office jobs, like acting or sports.

There have been a variety of well-paid jobs that didn't use computers that a 60-year-old might have done over their life, meaning that this can't even be broken up along class/income lines.

[wang_li]

I'm 55 and likely have been using computers longer than that poster has been alive. Regardless of the fact that I started young, by the time I was in college the PC revolution was in full swing and everyone had and worked with computers.

My mother, born in 1934, had no problem using computers. She didn't internalize how they work, but she learned the workflows she needed. How to launch applications and so on.

The situation described in that comment is just a broken app, it has nothing to do with the age or the understanding of the user.

[jimbokun]

Most people under 60 aren’t full stack devs either.

[Hard_Space]

Well, neither am I - I am talking about my own peer group, non-tech types just fine with computers.

[asdfasvea]

Dude, you know what he meant. Don't be the internet pedant. No need to be the protector of your class, especially one so inconsequential as "literal 60 year olds".

Instead of "old person" he put a number on it. (Cue the people who need to cut me down because I used a male pronoun for an unknown poster)