Teens React To Windows 95

mdburkey said:
Because some of them simply did not work right with the MS-DOS mode under Windows 95 -- even if you booted straight to it and never started the GUI. You basically HAD to start from a MS-DOS 5 floppy for everything to be happy.
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What games? I don't remember ever having to do that.
 
dceremuga said:
Quite honestly, a bright group of kids. Well spoken in comparison to what we normally see. I'm rather pleased. I'm 50 and what I see in this generation coming out of High School is just scary. The black guy was the brightest of the group. So much for stereo-typing!
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Agreed on the current crop of high schoolers and college age kids being scary -- especially when it comes to finding ones with half a clue on technology/engineering related stuff.

Most of the ones in the 25-35 year age range I've dealt with are at least educable -- and most are aware of what a router is, how to do some basic diagnosis of why their internet doesn't work, enable/disable basic functions in Windows, and quite a few have some coding experience from school.

A lot of the ones under 25 are just like the ones in the video -- they just expect everywhere to have WiFi, don't have a clue what a wireless router is, just expect everything to work.
And even a lot of supposed CS majors have almost no basic IT skills -- and we've run into a lot that have almost zero programming experience even by the time they are JUNIORS.

Part of the problem is the kids, but the education system is to blame too. What they are (or rather aren't) teaching kids these days has to do with a lot of the problem.

When I was in high school, they weren't "teaching to the test" and we still had lots of classes that really TAUGHT you stuff -- our computer class was almost completely programming based (BASIC and Pascal).

My chemistry class was way more difficult and advanced than what I had in college actually (we spent at least a couple of days in the chem lab every week -- and had tests where we had to do full acid/base titrations and determining unknown). Heck, much of the stuff we did would be considered "too dangerous" for kids these days -- which is why we had to have full goggles and lab coats (I actually got burning sulfur thrown on my lab coat one time, and one of the girls in the class who had a ton of hair spray in her hair caught her hair on fire -- but no one got hurt). For that matter, at one point our chem teacher used to mix up small batches of nitro in the lab and then take them out and let the students watch him detonate them on the football field (which was cool, but he was finally asked to stop -- because of the damage it was doing to the field!).

In 2nd year drafting class we did full sets of house plans from scratch. In biology, we had to do full dissections on frogs, sharks, and fetal pigs.

And this was all in PUBLIC high school.
 
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OldBuzzard said:
!?!??!?!?!?!?

I just happen to be 70 years old, and if they had the 'computer skills' I have the would have known how to code in IBM Assembler Language, COBOL, RPG, FORTRAN, and NEAT3.

I've been in Data Processing (what you kiddies call IT) since 1968, LONG before you were ever a gleam in your pappy's eye.

Don't dis your elders :D:D:D
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You sir are a year older than the transistor.

I dare not approach your lawn.
 
cyclone3d said:
What games? I don't remember ever having to do that.
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At this juncture, I don't remember which ones -- too many years ago -- but there were some that didn't like the differences. They were few and far between and were generally titles that pushed DOS to its limits and took full advantage of LIM EMS memory, etc.
 
These kids need to see what it took to run a program on an Apple ][ or Commodore 64. :D
 
mdburkey said:
Agreed on the current crop of high schoolers and college age kids being scary -- especially when it comes to finding ones with half a clue on technology/engineering related stuff.

Most of the ones in the 25-35 year age range I've dealt with are at least educable -- and most are aware of what a router is, how to do some basic diagnosis of why their internet doesn't work, enable/disable basic functions in Windows, and quite a few have some coding experience from school.

A lot of the ones under 25 are just like the ones in the video -- they just expect everywhere to have WiFi, don't have a clue what a wireless router is, just expect everything to work.
And even a lot of supposed CS majors have almost no basic IT skills -- and we've run into a lot that have almost zero programming experience even by the time they are JUNIORS.

Part of the problem is the kids, but the education system is to blame too. What they are (or rather aren't) teaching kids these days has to do with a lot of the problem.

When I was in high school, they weren't "teaching to the test" and we still had lots of classes that really TAUGHT you stuff -- our computer class was almost completely programming based (BASIC and Pascal).
My chemistry class was way more difficult and advanced than what I had in college actually (we spent at least a couple of days in the chem lab every week -- and had tests where we had to do full acid/base titrations and determining unknown). Heck, much of the stuff we did would be considered "too dangerous" for kids these days -- which is why we had to have full goggles and lab coats (I actually got burning sulfur thrown on my lab coat one time, and one of the girls in the class who had a ton of hair spray in her hair caught her hair on fire -- but no one got hurt). For that matter, at one point our chem teacher used to mix up small batches of nitro in the lab and then take them out and let the students watch him detonate them on the football field (which was cool, but he was finally asked to stop -- because of the damage it was doing to the field!).

In 2nd year drafting class we did full sets of house plans from scratch. In biology, we had to do full dissections on frogs, sharks, and fetal pigs.
And this was all in PUBLIC high school.
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Hey md, that was very well said!
 
Come on , I understand if you only use a laptop or all in one. The desktop computer is still plentiful and has a button for the monitor and button for the PC, even my 5 y/o knows how to turn on a PC. Heck my 3y/o knows what button to push to turn it on.
 
flatty said:
Im curious how they would react seeing installation method of Windows 3 for example, using 9-10 floppy diskets, or seemg an 1 Giga HDD (a BIG one at some moment) :))
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Or show them an Apple II connected to a Corvus Hard drive.
Corvus was one of the 1st hard drives available on the Apple II. I used to work on them when I first started in the computer industry, 10MB on a couple 8" platters. Drive was a big & heavy an original PC, and the controller consisted of 3 boards, each the size of an older mother board. If you swap one of the boards, you needed a dual trace scope and had to fiddle with 3 adjustments to re-align the boards. Then we ran them over night in a test cycle. Sounded like we had a jet engine running in the tech area :)
 
KazeoHin said:
That's what I meant by 'professionals': people who use PCs at work. Many offices are moving to notebooks with docking stations, though.
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Laptops & docking stations is what we have for the people who travel, need to bring their work home with them on a regular basis, or just need to bring a system to meetings.
For people who need to remote in occasionally, and need more than just email access, I provide them with an older laptop.
 
I kinda call Shens on this whole thing.

Look, if you can use Windows 7, you can use Windows 95. It has a start menu. It has program groups. It all works the same.

Now as far as getting connected to the Internet? Sure. I could see that as a problem.

But using Windows 95? That was all play acting. You click and run. No frickin' difference.
 
MV75 said:
Meh, just the generation that treats everything like a phone. They might be able to teach me how to use a modern phone. Nah not really, accomplishing phone wizardry is the domain of the idiot.
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That's what my grandfather said about computer users.
 
mdburkey said:
At this juncture, I don't remember which ones -- too many years ago -- but there were some that didn't like the differences. They were few and far between and were generally titles that pushed DOS to its limits and took full advantage of LIM EMS memory, etc.
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Hmm.. I did use 3rd party memory managers as well as a program to figure out what ranges I could allocate for high memory.

My setup was not at all typical so maybe that is why I didn't have to use DOS boot disks for anything.
 
TechLarry said:
I kinda call Shens on this whole thing.

Look, if you can use Windows 7, you can use Windows 95. It has a start menu. It has program groups. It all works the same.

Now as far as getting connected to the Internet? Sure. I could see that as a problem.

But using Windows 95? That was all play acting. You click and run. No frickin' difference.
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The reactions here seemed pretty reasonable. The things that seem to throw them off were things that are simply obsolete. Dial up modems, floppy disks, performance, etc. Like one of them mentioned, smartphones are much more powerful than that bulky thing they were messing with. Plus a lot of us have been using this stuff for a long time now. I've been using Windows every day for over two decades now and lived through the 95 era. Something they'd never seen is something I was using as an adult professionally.
 
I'm just happy I don't have to sit there and calculate or trial and error the timeslices that a given application needs to run without unacceptable latency. And prior to that, I was happy that I didn't have to see HIPE nonsense ever again. It's not like that Windows 95 installation was running on progman or something, it was full blown Explorer -- those kids are just retarded that they had so much difficulty understanding the interface. "What's a modem?" also threw me for a loop -- just what in the hell do you think is in your mobile phone for data, kids? :(
 
NeghVar said:
Windows 95 did not receive as much credit as it deserves. When I have asked people about Windows 95, they say it sucked. Windows 7/10 is much better. Well, yes, but you cannot compare it to new technology. It must be compared with previous technology. For one, memory management. No more memmaker.exe or memmnger.exe. No more dealing with 640K conventional, upper, extended and expanded memory. Best of all, no more 8.3 file name format.
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As I recall, the gold release of Win95 wasn't the most stable thing ever, but once OSR2 came around it was really quite good for the time. It was a huge milestone for resetting the user interface, even though it was the brunt of a lot of jokes at the time.

After Win95, I'd argue that the biggest advancements were protected memory in XP, preventing installed program memory mapping errors from bluescreening, and instead just crashing the running program, greatly improving windows stability, and later Vista, adding the (at first much hated, but later accepted) UAC, which greatly improved security if used properly.
 
Some of it was complete BS. Some of it was definitely staged.

Some of it seems right. There was some where it was trial and error. Push the button. It comes on. What about the rest? Oh, try this one. That's how toddlers do it. Try things until it works.

Windows 95 is very similar to Windows 7. If you can use Windows 7, you can use Windows 95 to do basic things. Yes, things are dull and some things are in different places. But, the general look is the same. Taskbar, Start menu, desktop, icons, Recycle Bin, My Computer....

Now, these kids may have never touched a computer and only used a phone as their primary device for quite a while. It may just be lack of exposure. Although, even schools have computers (some fairly outdated) that kids have to take the class... I just don't see how they couldn't get exposure. Either they are extremely sheltered kids, or it's just an over-reaction to please the camera.

The more of these "React" videos, the less faith I put into them. It's a big show, and some of the reactions are obviously way overdone for the camera. Their acting career is getting a head start with these.

And Pentium 133? I had it on a 486 DX/33. Loved it, though. Slow, but what wasn't?
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Most kids these days are actually incredibly technologically illiterate. Basic tasks are so user friendly now that they have no idea how any of the underlying technology works.
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This is how technology advances. Reductions in cost and end user complexity are the cornerstones that drive adoption of technology.
 
heatlesssun said:
This is how technology advances. Reductions in cost and end user complexity are the cornerstones that drive adoption of technology.
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But, some kids can figure stuff out. They can adapt to different technology. Older? They'll figure it out. They'll take a look, and actually play and try. Others will be like "I dunno. I can't do it.", even if they use Windows at home. It's just different and they say they can't do it. Many older things are pretty intuitive. You see a switch where a power button would be? Probably the right one. End user complexity is some of it, it's much easier to use. But, the techie kids will still figure it out and do a good job at adapting.
 
They'll never know the struggle of having to pierce your own “frozen rope/thick Ethernet” cables to make a split off. F'n 10base5.

Ugh. Those cables hurt like the dickens when whipped by one.
 
modi123 said:
They'll never know the struggle of having to pierce your own “frozen rope/thick Ethernet” cables to make a split off. F'n 10base5.

Ugh. Those cables hurt like the dickens when whipped by one.
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Or tweaking your own Autoexec.bat and config.sys files trying to cram as much of the driver stuff as possible into extended RAM, to free up enough base RAM to run your game :p
 
Ur_Mom said:
But, some kids can figure stuff out. They can adapt to different technology. Older? They'll figure it out. They'll take a look, and actually play and try. Others will be like "I dunno. I can't do it.", even if they use Windows at home. It's just different and they say they can't do it. Many older things are pretty intuitive. You see a switch where a power button would be? Probably the right one. End user complexity is some of it, it's much easier to use. But, the techie kids will still figure it out and do a good job at adapting.
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I agree with what you're saying here but these kids don't strike me as stupid but just not experienced with stuff this old. Hell I can't remember the last time I touched a Windows 95 machine and I certain it's not something someone this age in an advanced economy nation has seen much of these days. So most of this comes across to me as just lack of experience with what they see as old, crappy tech. But give some time using it I'm sure most of them would come to recognize the similarity of it to a modern Windows PC, assuming that most of them would have some experience there. But in the age of mobile, I don't know. I know a lot of kids this age that are glued to just phones and tablets though they do have to use a computer for real work from time to time.
 
modi123 said:
Zarathustra[H] - good old Ram Doubler installs.. now kids just go to DownloadMoreRAM.com - CloudRAM 2.0 all easy-peasy like.
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Yeah, I guess what is lost here is, in the past, if something didn't work, you may not have been a computer wiz, but at least you understood some of how the underlying shit worked, and could do some basic trouble shooting, and over time learn your way to being an advanced user.

Now, with everything pre-digested for them, they have never experienced having to troubleshoot or fix anything, so when something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong) they are stuck.
 
I actually watched the whole thing after reading a few of the comments here. All things considered, most of them (the teens) were pretty reasonable about it, and the one guy was totally onboard. Honestly much less depressing than this video series tends to be for me. The OP feels overly harsh after actually watching.
 
wicktr0n_ said:
Are they dumb and uncultured, or is OP just old? Legit question, though.

If you're born in the 80's, you would say these same things about a punch-card terminal.
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Yeah, I was born in 82 and I was quite aware of punch cards. A friend of runs a textile factory and they used punched cards until the early 2000's. Some of the tech they had in the 80's was amazing. Full body scanners, huge touch sensitive drawers, and whatnot.
 
heatlesssun said:
This is how technology advances. Reductions in cost and end user complexity are the cornerstones that drive adoption of technology.
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Indeed, if everyone had to program in Assembler, we would have very few programmers and we certainly wouldn't have the complex systems we have today.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah, I guess what is lost here is, in the past, if something didn't work, you may not have been a computer wiz, but at least you understood some of how the underlying shit worked, and could do some basic trouble shooting, and over time learn your way to being an advanced user.

Now, with everything pre-digested for them, they have never experienced having to troubleshoot or fix anything, so when something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong) they are stuck.
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I did all that and still get stuck. I only get unstuck, most of the time, because we have search engines (yet another simplification). 20 years ago, I missed the Autoexec, Config.sys and Himem, but now I'm glad I don't have to mess with it.
 
Make them use DOS 6.22 with that text gui shell thingy, then we'll talk.
 
Yeah, should've scared the shit out of them by firing up DOS instead.

Better yet, have them try and navigate a BBS.

(used DOS in one form or another until approx '97)
 
xorbe said:
Make them use DOS 6.22 with that text gui shell thingy, then we'll talk.
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Are you talking about Norton Commander?

5x-31c57dd66ec0ca2fbe01c35c197d6867-Norton%20Commander%205%20-%20Info.png
 
xorbe said:
I think this ... I can't remember, it's been so long. I thought it had the ability to swap between two or more classic command prompts.

DOS_Shell_Screen.png
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I have a very vague recollection of this, but I don't recall from where. I definitely used Norton Commander for years though, from the late 80's through when I stopped using DOS some time in the mid to late 90's.
 
xorbe said:
Make them use DOS 6.22 with that text gui shell thingy, then we'll talk.
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PC Tools was was a great graphical shell/utility for DOS. Sadly they got bought out by Symantec, where good tools go to die.
 
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