Average age of computer users?

Factual Questions
1

I am 59 yrs. old and I don’t see many people my age or generation using computers other than really basic stuff like email or simple word or excel documents for personal and work related issues. However, as you go down the list of generations that have succeeded mine you find more users who are much more fluent in computerese.

I am wondering if anyone knows what the average age range is of computers these days? It would seem obvious that kids brought up with digital stuff would use computers much more heavily as just a given in their lives.

Does anyone have any reliable stats by ages ranges

2

Haven’t found any real recent studies, but this one from the Census Bureau in 2003 shows the following percentages of folks who have a computer at home.



Age          %
25 to 34   68.7
35 to 44   73.3
45 to 54   71.9
55 to 64   63.1
65+        34.7

However, I think the trend here isn’t that older folks are less likely to use a computer. It’s what age a person was when personal computers came into use. They started to become ubiquitous in the workplace in the late 80s, and so many workers who were under 40 in 1990 most likely had to become computer proficient in order to keep their job. Those 40 year olds are now 60, and so I’d guess the percentage of folks under 60 who aren’t computer users is shrinking rapidly.

I’m in my mid-40s, and we didn’t have PCs in my high school. But by the time I left college, they were everywhere. Folks who are 30 now started using PCs in elementary school.

3

There were computers long before there were personal computers. I’m in my mid 60s, and I first used a computer when I was still a teenager, back in the mid 1960s.

4

Maybe in some God-forsaken backwater 30 years ago was the earliest that PCs were in elementary schools, but it was a lot earlier than that in many places.

I’m almost 38, and we had Apple 2+ computers in my elementary school when I was in 3rd grade. We had to take mandatory computer classes in 7th grade- I was in mine when the Challenger blew up, as a matter of fact.

I think that a lot of it depends on the sort of industry that the older people worked in, as well as their personal comfort with change and new things. My father worked for the city water department, and my mother was a teacher; both used PCs quite a bit in their jobs, especially in the last decade or so before they retired (1995-2005)

My dad recently switched to a Mac, and my mother seriously covets my brother’s iPad, although she has a PC of her own, and they have a wi-fi network that covers everything.

My 86 year old grandmother has a PC as well, and sends tons of glurge and other stuff, but she’s not real computer savvy by most standards, although I suppose for an 86 year old she is.

5

So that would be about 31 years ago. :dubious:

6

It may not be 100% relevant to the OP’s question but we gathered some fairly reliable statistics within the past six months or so about the age ranges and “average age” of Dopers. If you want links to those threads I could provide them.

7

I volunteer at a retirement center and the older people I know are just afraid of computers or don’t want to learn. And trust me when an 85 year old woman doesn’t WANT to do something, heaven help you try to convince her otherwise.

I’ve had old ladies tell me they aren’t smart enough to use comptuers, because to that generation a computer is a complex thing. True it’s complex but not like it once was.

And when I add, “If you can make those complex knitting patterns and use those stiches that take 50 loops for each stitch you can use a computer.”

But they don’t want to, so I drop it.

8

Congrats to both of you. :slight_smile: But the point wasn’t when the first computers appeared, it was when they first became widespread. The question isn’t about when the first people started using computers, but really when we’ll see the last generation of people who can get by without using them.

When I wrote that we didn’t have PCs in my school (I graduated high school in 1986), I didn’t mean that there wasn’t one to be found anywhere. What I meant was that they weren’t in every class room, there weren’t a row of workstations in the library, and they weren’t part of the everyday curriculum. (FWIW, I took computer programming as a high school freshman in 1982. My school offered courses in BASIC and Fortran. We worked on a mainframe, and those computers really weren’t used for anything besides those classes.)

The folks who don’t use a computer today are mostly folks who never had to use a computer. And I’m saying that’s mostly people who finished school or left the work force before about 1990.

9

Personal data: I’m 68. Worked around mainframe computer operations and programming since 1968. Knew of home computers with the TRS-80 Radio Shack puppy in the late 70’s. Played with my son’s Commodore VIC-20 and 64 from 1982 on. Met my second wife on a Commodore 64 Bulletin Board System in 1985; married her in 1986. Got a desktop PC on my work desk in 1995. Had internet access that same year. Got my first home PC in 1996 and became a bona fide web surfer right away. Joined this message board in 2003.

My version of “widespread” would be the World Wide Web’s inception in the early 90’s. Before that it was just too “techie” (or too much hassle to get any enjoyment out of it) to reach the average non-technical user.

YMMV

10

From my experience, 60 is right around the cusp between the generation that grew up without computers and the generation taking advantage of PCs as they were introduced. I’m the same age as jakesteele and I’d say that probably 95% of the people I know that are my age are more than computer literate.

I started with Fortran in college and spent my time in lines waiting for punch cards to run. I was way behind a few friends that were writing their own compilers but ahead of many who found even the Wang calculators for stat class hard to process.

I bought my first computer, a Timex 2000 (for the number of bytes in memory), in the early 80s, and then a real PC clone around 1984. Most of my friends were doing the same at the time. I vividly remember the one super-expert guru showing me ARPANET and me not comprehending what the heck he was talking about.

My vast and deep expertise, cough, cough, made me the logical candidate the become my department’s computer go-to guy when we got our first PC in 1985. I put our budget on Lotus 1-2-3 and it got turned in on time for the first time in many years. Won an award for that.

But even that limited knowledge of word processing and spreadsheets put me way ahead of most of my work colleagues. And that’s probably because I was about the youngest one there. The rest would have been in their 40s or higher. Almost all the people I worked with on my level in other departments were also in their mid-30’s and they easily took to computers. Now that I think about it, the person I excluded when I said 95% of my friends above is about 8 years older than me.

So I saw PCs enter the workplace from the first general installation. I would be stunned to learn that any of the city schools had PCs at that time. Probably a few suburban or Catholic schools did, but they had budgets and money and lots of stuff that city schools didn’t.

I freelanced for software companies very lucratively in the 90s. There were a lot of coders who were just out of school. But there were also whole cadres of guys who were from the COBOL era and knew all the legacy code.

anson2995’s chart looks about right to me, even biased by the number of much older responders. Those under 65 have pretty much grown up with computers and have had to deal with them for so long that the fear of newness has been pounded out. Those over 65 include the small percentage who got into computers early and a larger set that adopted them only because it became too difficult not to have one.

That’s not quite the same thing as saying that the 40-65 generation lives on Facebook or constantly texts or the other deep immersion habits of younger adults. I don’t see any need to other than creating yet another time sink. If that’s what jakesteele meant, then I can agree. But I work all day at a computer. That’s immersion enough.

11

By all means, please do so if you would be so kind.

12

A lot of that mind set is simply not that old dogs can’t learn new tricks, it’s more a matter of them not wanting to. The older you get the more set in your ways you become and learning new things means having to go up a very alien and foreign learning curve that you will never get over and will always be experiencing the attendant frustration. I came from an era where everything was done with Underwood Typewriters and sheets of carbon paper for duplicates.

One of the things I refuse to do is to refuse to own a cell phone. It is just another device that I have to figure out and learn how to use. I only remember how to do the things I would do over and over again, like getting dial tone and dialing a number.

It’s that old saying, “If it works, why change it?”

13

These were all active at the same basic time back in March:

What Dopers were born in the same year?
Started 03-05-2008, 04:41 PM by Asimovian

What is the average age of Dopers?
Started 03-02-2010, 04:21 PM by middleman

How old are you?
Started 03-02-2010, 04:55 PM by Giles

THIS IS THE DOPER YEAR/MONTH/DECADE OF BIRTH POLL (ignore all others)
Started 03-13-2010, 11:24 AM by Sampiro

(In fairness, the title refers to earlier attempts to get a poll posted, not to the other threads dealing with ages and birth years and such).

On 03-09-2010, 09:13 AM NinetyWt said: Check out this pivot table:

There are older threads, for sure, but these are as up-to-date as I have kept up with.

14

I am 81 years old and have been working with computers for 50 - 60 years. Still kicking too.

15

Man, glad to find a mature Doper here. :smiley:

I’ll be 83 in early August, and been using computers since 1981 when I got a Commodore VIC-20. Marveled at the thing. Few years later built my first PC, a 286 with a “monstrous” 10 MB HDD. Hey, it beat saving data files to 4 1/4" floppies.

Been a computer phreak ever since, and still am. Maybe we’ll up the average a bit.