Re: Not MY kids... Message #20 Posted by John Noble on 9 Dec 2009, 12:28 a.m., in response to message #19 by bill platt
Well, I predate the first Moon landing by a couple of years, but my parents were definitely Boomers ('45 and '48) so I must be GenX. 1970 places you right at the beginning, by the common definition.
But we are old GenX. The world of our youth was more like our parents' than that of those just a few years younger. When I was a kid, we rode in the backs of pickup trucks without anyone getting arrested, had three TV networks, played records, dialed phones, watched Cronkite, were annoyed by Guy Lombardo on New Year's Eve, laughed at little Japanese cars, and read about (but were never allowed to approach) computers that filled rooms.
Just a few years later, everything was different.
And so our approach to technology is different. In my case, I wind my watch every morning (and get a time hack from my NTP-synced computer about once a week), look stuff up in a paper dictionary (but have several hundred ebooks sourced from the Gutenberg Project and compiled/formatted with my own custom software), play vinyl records from my large collection (but was a very early employee of an Internet-connected, MP3-playing jukebox company), and tend to work out problems on paper (but I own a HP-12C, 33S, and 35S--and program all of them ... or write a program on my Linux-running, wireless-having, always-on submini Netbook).
Having learned things the hard way through necessity (like when I used to do speaker enclosure designs with a sheet of log/log paper, a pencil, and a simple scientific calculator), I find I have a much better grasp of what's going on under the hood than a lot of the younger people I've worked with. It has been a big advantage for me, and I'd like to pass it on to my kids.
But I do wonder if this isn't wrong-headed since technology is rapidly getting so complex that it takes lots of automation, not to mention blind faith, to do anything with all these neat toys. Maybe I shouldn't worry about it. After all, if we figured it out so will our kids.
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