In previous times, what did people have to keep up-to-date on, such as WRT technology?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I don’t want this to come across as an anti-tech rant, but my wife and I often comment on the challenge of staying abreast with technology developments such as phones, TV, and computers. For just one example, a while back, I traded in a Droid phone for an iPhone, and saved my photos to Google cloud. Transferring my photos from my old iMac to my new one was done through iCloud. Reconciling the two, was another step. That just is not the sort of thing my mom and dad would have to do WRT their photos.

My wife and I are both lawyers, aged 60. We don’t think of ourselves as particularly stupid, but this sort of thing just really makes us feel so. I suspect a part of our problem is that we don’t just enjoy messing around with our phones and computers on an ongoing basis, so when we make a major change, it is of greater magnitude than if we had been incrementally upgrading all along.

It got me thinking about whether any aspects in which folk in previous generations had to so consistently adapt to changes and updates WRT day-to-day activities.

Again, I’m not criticizing technology. Just marveling at the time and mental effort it consumes. We are fortunate that we are reasonably intelligent, and have sufficient $. I wonder how less fortunate folk are able to cope.

2

Some people would transfer their 8 mm home movies to VHS (and other formats further down the line), I gather.

3

What you’re describing is much more a consequence of Apple or Google/Samsung/etc… having control over their ecosystems, and engineering it to be deliberately difficult to move between them. Lock-in is what it’s called. I wouldn’t feel stupid- they go out of their way to make that less convenient than it could be.

I’ve been thinking about this- it seems to me that there are “procedures”, for lack of a better word, that people learn and become accustomed to, and most technological changes are simply incremental changes to the procedure. For example, driving a 2021 car isn’t that different than a 1991 car, or a 1971 car, etc… There have been incremental changes, but the fundamentals are the same. Same thing for televisions- you have a device that lets you switch channels and watch different things. We’ve gone from knobs, to keypads, to remote controls, to cable boxes, to DVRs. And computers are the same way… using Discourse isn’t particularly different than other PC or smartphone applications- there have been incremental changes along the way.

Where it’s become different lately is that we’re seeing combinations of “procedures”- now you have to be able to apply your computer knowledge to your TV, phone, car, etc… and vice-versa. It’s not enough to hook up your TV to your streaming gizmo (Roku, Chromecast, etc…) or run your streaming app, you now have to know how that integrates with your home network for troubleshooting purposes. You have to keep track of passwords. And so on. You don’t just have to have a handle on how to play media, you have to know that AND how to search online, connect to a network, stream from your phone, etc… That’s two “procedures” that are intertwined.

This obviously stymies a lot of people- it’s kind of like the VCR time setting stuff all over again- people can handle sticking the tape in the player and using Play, FF, Rew, and Pause, but going through a series of events to set the time isn’t within that media-playing “procedure”, so it throws them off. And the computing aspects, be they integrated apps, smartphones, PCs, websites, etc… are still relatively young, and change all the time.

You see this with people who grumble about how cars are “harder to work on with all the computers”. This is actually pretty untrue- if you understand what’s going on, the computers tell you a LOT about what’s going on with your car and help you narrow your problems down quicker. But if you don’t have that computer knowledge or you can’t really integrate the idea of a error code that corresponds to a certain problem and extrapolate what the problem might be, and how to test that, you’re going to struggle to figure it out and fix it.

4

Right - my last 2 cars have had interfaces that really stymied me. Very basic example - first time in 40+ years of car owning that I had difficulty adjusting the clock for time changes. Had to go into some folder with a name that didn’t make sense to me, scroll down to a screen not immediately apparent, …

Yeah - it became pretty apparent that both google and Apple clouds were more interested in having you buy increased storage on their systems, than to make it easy to do what we wanted. So much of modern technology “service” strikes us as similarly sales directed. To which my default setting is generally, “Can I just do without this altogether?”

I really don’t want to end up in my Unabomber cabin but after hours of unsuccessfully wrestling w/ something I feel ought to be far simpler- off grid has its appeals! :smiley:

Thanks for the thoughtful answer, bump.

5
  • shrugs *

I was introduced to the Mac pretty soon after it made its debut. I still own the first 800K diskette, and amazingly, as of the last time I tried it, it could still be read when inserted. Of course, it, along with all the other diskettes I toted around back in that era, have long since been converted to disk images which sit on my hard disk.

I learned to make hard drive backups pretty early on, and kept the backups to restore from long after any given computer was no longer my current / newest. Later on, I used those in emulators and virtual machines, so a good portion of the environments I’ve ever sat at and worked in are still right here with me on this computer. Also, each time I bought a new computer, all the files from the old one (and all the software applications) were brought over, and dropped only when they can’t be made to run on the new operating system.

It always seemed self-explanatory, but as I said I started using them when they were new — and simpler, at least for most things (not everything, mind you; back in the day, the method for sending someone an email with a file attachment was to compress the file, then convert the compressed file to BinHex, then carry it to the university on a PC floppy, upload it to the mainframe, then type out the email and finally append the BinHex file to the bottom of the message body of the email).

On the other hand, I never hopped on board the smartphone train, and I guess when I’m finally forced to use one more often than I do now, I’ll be way behind the curve and in a situation more like folks who feel intimidated by computer technology.

6

For the past 30 years or so, I’ve been mulling over why “computer” issues and computerized stuff seem to throw people off so badly, when they can handle the separate pieces adequately, but combining them seems to cause issues far beyond the sum of the parts. People don’t realize that say… a Netflix app is the same fundamental thing, whether it’s on their phone, integrated into their TV, on their Roku, on the Netflix website, or embedded in their cable/satellite box. They don’t think that way- a TV is a TV, a phone is a phone, and a cable box is a cable box. And having Netflix on all of them confuses the shit out of people, as they don’t think of it as the same thing everywhere.

If you “get” the way these things interact, then a lot of that stuff is really, really slick and cool. But that takes a fair dose of insight to zap you at some point I fear.

You mentioned cars… the last couple of 2019+ model year cars I’ve had have had absurdly complicated audio system user interfaces. One was a 2019 model year rental Toyota, and the other is a 2021 Honda. Just to listen to the radio in both cars required reading the manual AND a fair amount of fiddling. As a 49 year old technology professional with decades in IT, and decades of using technological gew-gaws, this seemed absolutely absurd- they ought to default to having the knobs be the volume and the radio tuner, and anything more complicated could require you to get into the menus, etc… But neither did, and it was amazingly frustrating, in no small part because I was thinking “I should know how to use the radio on a car!” the whole time I was fiddling with the menus.

I mean I’m not even close to being any kind of Luddite, and these cars were unintuitive to a very frustrating extreme.

7

You’ve obviously thought about this a good deal.

Me - I just really don’t care for most tech. Yeah, I appreciate all the things it can do. But in my day to day life, I want my phone for phone calls and texts, my computer for word processes sing and surfing the net, and my car from getting here to there. I used to be WAY into stereos, in a way that might be analogous to folk feeling at ease with computers. But such analog systems were IMO WAY more obvious.

Our work is in the process of completely changing over our records/document generation systems. I won’t get into it other than to say their manner of explaining it has been laughably bad. Maybe 6 months ago, everyone had to attend some initial training - eve tho we wouldn’t use it for months. Then, each month, we’ve had to attend training sessions of the new aspects rolled out that month - again, even tho we weren’t all using it.

I used it for the first time last week. When I went to the on-line info, they were ridiculously complex. They would start saying, “You can start any number of ways. You can a…b…c…” And they did that for EVERY step.

Well, I just messed around with it and it is ridiculously simple. I wrote up a 1 page list that coulda been presented as, “Click HERE dummy.” I think tech fans are so in love with their stuff that they cannot even comprehend that a good many of us just view it as a tool, and we really don’t care HOW we get from here to there. Just tell me clearly the most obvious way to do it, and I’ll do that. IF, down the line, I want to see if there is a different approach, have that info available where I can get at it.

Another thing. Developers seem to overestimate my capacity to discern critical info from noise. They present huge menus of EVERYTHING their tech can do, whereas I may be happy just doing this one tiny little bit of it. All that extra stuff just makes it harder for me to do the one basic thing. Allow more sophisticated users to open the more complex aspects, rather than flooding it all across the start screen.

And we haven’t mentioned the cost. (Yeah, I now these are all old topics. My parents rented the wall phone from the phone company, and got TV free through an antenna. I’m afraid to really look at how many $hundred a month we spend on phone/TV/computer…

I should stop ranting now.

8

It bears mentioning that for quite a while, none of this was “slick”, it was quite buggy and convoluted.

It’s still not entirely out of the woods. How do I watch Westworld? Is it HBO Max? HBO Go? HBO Now? HBO Something Else? Oh, one of them is free with my internet, and one’s free with my TV package. But… I watch my internet on TV, does that count or not? The online documentation is out of date, email support won’t respond before the game starts, phone support sends me to a person in India who will not proceed until I’ve provided my router model number.

Master this arcane knowledge, and your reward is that you get to master it all again whenever you change devices, or change services, or the provider suddenly just decides to dump it all and start over because it’s not making enough money.

I mean, I work in the tech field and I’m fucking tired of the tech churn. Can’t imagine how it is for an aging non-techie to go through.

9

This beginning to age non-techie dumped and simplified as much as possible.

Ditched pay tv years ago, I have a “smart”(incredibly stupid) tv that hasn’t been turned on in almost a year. I don’t have home internet, I can do everything I need to do online from my phone. To be fair, there are 3 maybe 4 things I prefer a computer for doing, but I don’t need a computer. Almost there 100% of my online is through my phone, which allows me to pick and choose the software I like and understand best. For the most part. Except when I screw up and decide iphone is a good choice, like now with mu current phone.

Yep, not anti-technology, I just realized that I’m aging and getting set in my ways and the world is starting to pass me by and I’m mostly ok with that.

10

I too have a ‘smart’ TV. I spent ages when we got it fiddling with all the adjustments, but since then it’s pretty much been used as a simple TV.

I am not, however, a great fan of phones. I do have a smartphone and I know it does all kinds of stuff, but mostly I want to send and receive calls and texts. I have this neat computer with a decent-sized screen for doing all the banking, emails, forums, games, etc.

11

This, completely. Aging also means aging eyes. I don’t want to watch a movie on my phone.

12

Back to the OP’s question, if I’m understanding it correctly, here are some examples I can think of:

  1. Many houses had old 2-prong receptacles for many years after 3-prong plugs became common on new applicances. This led to the use of cheater plugs or installing new 3-prong receptacles (sometimes grounded, probably more often not). GFCI plugs were not an option until many years later.

  2. The switch from pulse-dial rotary phones to touch-tone phones was a hassle, as people needed to upgrade their phone to take advantage of features that only worked with touch-tone lines (“press 0 to speak to an operator”). Early push button phones often had a physical switch to select whether the buttons sent DTMF tones or old-style pulses, so you could use them on either type of phone line.

  3. Another phone-related one was the gradual switch from older dialing methods (exchange+5-digits, or 7-digits) to full 10-digit dialing, which is still underway in some places. For some time if you were traveling in an unfamiliar area, it was a crap-shoot to guess how to dial a phone number. Some places required 10 digits for local calls, others required 7 digits for local calls.

  4. The introduction of color TV didn’t require upgrading equipment, since color NTSC signals are compatible with old black and white TVs, but many people did scrap their old functional TVs to get a color model.

  5. The introduction of unleaded gasoline caused problems with older cars. For some years both types of gas were available and you had to be sure to select the right one. When leaded gas disappeared, people with older cars had a problem.

13

Imagine being born in Chicago circa 1860s. You grow up with horse-drawn streetcars, livery-stables. You saw by whale oil or candle light and burned wood in a stove for heat. The only meat you eat is pork, and instead of restrooms you have either a chamber pot or an open window. The streets were constantly lined with human and animal excrement. Your fresh water is one tap for the entire apartment building, or if you are unlucky, a public fire hydrant. The supply is from Lake Michigan, which is coincidentally downstream from the river the city dumps into.

By the time you die in the '20s to '40s, you will probably eat half as much pork (or less), have seen the demise of horse power, the rise and fall of cable cars, electric suspended trolleys, the introduction of the Chicago “L”, the reversal of the Chicago River’s flow, the rise of automobiles, the taxi wars, the rise and fall of vaudeville, introduction of indoor plumbing, sliced bread, &etc.

~Max

14

Going back before mid-20th-century or so, I would guess that the aspects of life most subject to constant adaptation would be clothing and hair. Now your skirts are wide and your sleeves are narrow, oh look, now it’s the other way around. Gotta have a mustache, no, gotta be clean-shaven, boots, shoes, what.

Those of us who have spent most of our lives in basically the same type of clothes (and sometimes literally the same limited set of individual garments) for decades on end can’t easily imagine what “changing fashions” meant to people richer than working classes (and some working-class people too) between industrialization and, say, the 1960s.

The late 19th and early 20th century did see the (urban) transition to telegraph, telephone, electric light, steam heat, electric mass transit and automobiles (as Max_S noted). But those weren’t as quickly or constantly metamorphosing as the fashions of the day, or present-day electronic tech features.

15

Computer issues are more difficult for people because computers are complicated multifunction devices, and the vast majority of humans do not know how they are used.

I’ve had a weirdly privileged life when it came to computing, I was using a mainframe in the 70s in school, and while it wasn’t my major, I took a few basic classes about the design and operation of computers (it was actually in the electrical engineering department back then–would probably be a Computer Science course today.) Before computers were at all common in normal life, I understood how they worked, I understood how they stored information and retrieved it, and I understood the basic operation of the processing system. I understood what a compiler was and an operating system, and the basic parameters for what a computer program was and how it could operate. Interestingly the things I learned all those years ago, most of those paradigms are basically still valid. Someone who learned those same things back then, transported to 2021 would be shocked at the proliferation of GUIs and the miniaturization, but they would likely grok very quickly what a lot of major applications were doing on at least some level.

In the 1970s you really couldn’t easily be a casual computer user, there were a few secretarial type positions that had some level of casual terminal system setup and things of that nature, but to really use computers back then you had to actually understand how they worked. While many companies, universities and the government were using computers, managers and most staff didn’t have a terminal on their desk and wouldn’t know how to use the computer if their life depended on it, a small staff that understood them would run the programs they wanted and get the outputs they wanted.

As the 70s gave way to the 80s, the age of the personal computer began to arrive, and the computer went from being a “big iron machine” that many people interacted with indirectly, but few people used, to a small machine that far more people were expected to be able to operate. To handle this paradigm personal computers of the 1980s all took a swing at some basic layer of accessibility (the first GUIs) for non-technical people with zero interest in understanding how a computer worked. For non-GUI systems, lay users would usually keep a little note card telling them a sequence of commands to type to open “their program”, and they’d usually have to reboot or something if they got confused.

GUIs got better in the 90s and 2000s, and a whole generation, the majority of people to ever really use desktop personal computers, became familiar with them in this paradigm in which you learned “how to use a computer”, but had no reason to understand how it worked or a lot of the underlying concepts.

What this does is creates “task” oriented users. Like OP–someone who maybe wants to send emails and use a word processor. To that person, that’s all a computer is. Then another person just wants to boot up video games. Another person wants to use a spreadsheet and nothing else. Still another person is a creative professional using graphic design software, but does almost nothing else on a computer.

If you actually understand the underlying paradigms of computing, frankly none of the evolutions since the 1970s have been difficult to adapt to whatsoever, it’s just most people have never had a need to understand computing on this level.

What’s interesting is I hear from educators and other people more connected to the youngest generation, things are actually starting to go back the other way. While the desktop computers of the late 80s / 90s / 00s were very GUI driven and “easy”, in many ways you still had to understand certain paradigms that modern smartphone OSes largely obscure away. I’ve heard that younger people today have a great difficulty understanding things like a file system, or even how to do very basic troubleshooting. Most are not very comfortable using desktop or laptop computers, and many rarely use them outside of school computer labs. That form factor of computer is “for work” their video game consoles, phones and tablets are for entertainment, and they don’t recognize a lot of the paradigms they share.

I have a friend who said his daughter, who has used a smartphone for 10+ years and is in her teens, was almost in tears over having to install software on a computer, she just couldn’t understand it. Meanwhile I think even some of my least techie friends in the 90s could get a shrink wrapped software package home and installed relatively easily.

16

You might want to check out Downton Abbey. One of the major themes throughout the series is that of change so there are frequent examples of how new early 20th century technology either flusters them, is welcomed or is something in between. Everything from toasters to radios to new medical procedures.

Just don’t forget to polish the electric plugs every night and check them for vapors.

17

In the days when that Gutenberg guy invented the movable-type printing press, thus making printed materials vastly more available and affordable to vastly more people, it suddenly behooved a lot of people to learn how to read.

18

That’s a better way of putting what I was trying to say- basically people know their “task”- driving a car, using a television, etc… and most of the technological changes within that task have been incremental. B&W tv to color, knobs to keypads to remote controls. Tube to flat screen. Mono to stereo, and so on. All incremental and didn’t actually affect the “task” hardly at all. Same thing with media playing- a CD player was largely the same in terms of the “task” as a record or a tape player- you put the media in, and you made it play. The details were where it differed. But adding computer stuff into that changes the “task” pretty significantly. Now it’s not just making the TV work- it’s having to combine two different “tasks”, and that’s where people stumble.

I also think there’s a difference of mindset; I know quite a few people who are absolutely intolerant of having to diverge from the “task”- if things aren’t as simple and reliable as a toaster, there’s something wrong with it, no matter how much I might explain that something is very complicated, doing multiple things, and it may not react the way you expect every time. It’s almost like a difference of expectations- I don’t expect my phone to work perfectly- I fully expect to occasionally have to troubleshoot some weirdness, since it’s a computer and has a lot of moving parts, so to speak. But others seem to think that it only really does like 3 “tasks” - calling people, texting people and letting them google stuff. And they expect those three to be absolutely and completely bulletproof, and get angry if they’re not.

19

Thanks to all the people who have steered this back to my OP after my own digressing rant (tho it is nice to hear other people who feel the same as me.)

Some good examples, tho I’m not sure any of them alone are quite of the magnitude of modern tech. Yes - I’ve often wondered about the pace of change I’ve experienced - compared to someone going from horse/buggy to space flight. I’m not sure adopting any one technology identified has required such constant updating and relearning, but am going to give it more thought.

One other thought was possibly regime change. The folk who were subsumed into the Soviet bloc. Or someone sold into slavery. That sort of change might have required similar ongoing learning and adaptation.

Actually, many of the responses have been so thoughtful, that I am going to go back and read them more carefully. Thank you for putting into words much of what I have been feeling. A recurring daydream of mine has long been, how “off the grid” would I be willing to live? My conclusion - quite a bit. Like someone said upthread - I’m willing to give it SOME effort to remain up-to-date. But when I perceive it as requiring more effort than I wish to expend, I can imagine being content with much of the world passing me by. I’m pretty content with my analog pursuits - making acoustic music, golfing, gardening…

20

THIS - very much.

My wife put it this way the other day, that one of my greatest strengths - my focus - is also my weakness in this area. I am so good at focussing in on the limited things I want to do, that I am obliviousness to all the other information on the screen, which I pretty much lump together as ignorable “noise.” But that approach doesn’t work w/ tech.

And I VERY much perceive my phone and computer as “tools” which I want to perform limited tasks unchangeably. My mom and dad never had to “troubleshoot” the old rotary wall phone, and it made/received phone calls perfectly. Nor do I have to trouble shoot my hammer, or a pen and paper. My perception is that technological advances are making it tougher for folk w/ this mindset.