but obviously he had devoted his life rather single-mindedly to other things.
I am sure that is the factor in many cases. In life one has only so much time and one has to pick one’s battles. Something has to go… You have to choose what you want to be good at. If you are a business or professional person then you need to make those choices even more sharply, otherwise you won’t get critical tasks done.
Lots of people also gets bored I think, fed up. It was a time when I could spend hours fine tuning config.sys and autoexec.bat on some incarnation of my homemade PC 
Now were on Windows 10/11, and I couldn’t care less. I have to google to do the simplest of OS related things while wondering how we managed to do anything at all before Google. For most everyday private stuff I use a Chromebook, because it just works (without needing to google, which is more than a bit ironic), and works great with my phone. A Chromebook is severely limited compared with a PC though, so I still need a PC for some stuff. But, for the stuff I use a PC for, it could just as well be running DOS (well, 64 bit DOS I guess with a simple and light windows interface would be perfect)
What I mean is that often people just don’t care enough to even learn the “basics”. The reason is it’s mostly just different (not better) ways of doing stuff that worked just fine already 30-40 years ago. Chromebook is a different “cut the crap” approach, which I like.
To be far it’s a lot harder to learn the basics these days. You can’t fit a computer in your head any more.
kwlf wrote:
By this point he was literally sweating and shaking.
When I was a teaching assistant in computer science in the early 1980s, we had lots of people with “computer fright”. On the first computer lab you would see some people suddenly freeze up with fear. They had mistyped the login command and got an error message. They were literally scared that they had damaged the 1M€+ (adjusted for inflation) computer system.
One tactic we had was to grab their wrists and bang their hands at the keyboard. “See, nothing broke!” That usually helped.
LeSving wrote:
It was a time when I could spend hours fine tuning config.sys and autoexec.bat on some incarnation of my homemade PC
Ah, those were the days!
Like you, I now have zero interest in fettling the system.
kwlf wrote:
I suddenly began to realise why he had been putting it off for so long. He struggled to find the ‘on’ switch. Then he had to get a slip of paper with his password out of his wallet. He just about managed to open his Email program, but couldn’t search for the relevant Email. By this point he was literally sweating and shaking.
You are exactly describing the kind of behaviour I was trying to make this thread about. People like this display a phobic behaviour.
kwlf wrote:
I can’t imagine he would have failed to learn to use a computer had he put his mind to it, but obviously he had devoted his life rather single-mindedly to other things.
Well, maybe it really is a phobia? In which case putting his mind to it is not enough. It might actually need some sort of councelling.
I think it may well also be a question of self confidence. People like that surgeon are used to be the BEST at what they do. Something which defies that will insult their self esteem and so they get anxious and phobic about it.
DavidS wrote:
According to snopes.com this old news group post is the origin of the all-time classic “goofy user / frustrated techie” story
I remember the old Inmac catalogues, in their section for UPSes, there was always a photo of a man with a look of horror shining a torch at the screen of an IBM XT, as if shining a torch at the screen would do any good.
I remember the old Inmac catalogues, in their section for UPSes, there was always a photo of a man with a look of horror shining a torch at the screen of an IBM XT, as if shining a torch at the screen would do any good.
Lol… I remember pics of screens full of white out.
And I was once given a 5 inch floppy with obvious teeth marks to restore…
Aaaahhh Inmac. They were a huge customer of my then business, in the 1980s. Their market here was the big banks etc in London and elsewhere – basically big corporates, at a time when “office automation” (PCs, HP7475 plotters for graphics for the next layer of middle management above, Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics, etc) was exploding.
Their customers were also largely what one might call computer-illiterate (I used to visit a lot of the City institutions back then so I could see what was going on) so they worked on fat margins (50% of selling price; another similar outfit Black Box worked on 80%!) and a “no quibble” returns policy. So if Bruce Somebody (Vice President of IT) at Merrill Lynch bought some £2k item and could not get it to work in 4 mins 30 seconds he chucked it back at Inmac. After he got back to work after his triple bypass he might have been willing to spend 4 mins 35 seconds on it So a lot of stuff got returned. So over a year we sold them a mountain of stuff, say £200k, and then, once a year, a hopefully much smaller mountain, but still a sizeable pile, came back, scratched, dented, smashed up. 99% had no actual fault, of course. And Inmac, aggressive just like their customers (the first Wall Street movie was out around then and particularly in its casting was an amazingly accurate picture of corporate life in the financial sector) shafted the supplier into refurbishing this smashed up stuff for free, so we spent £10k retesting and reboxing everything.
So difficulties with IT are nothing new and they have always existed at all levels. I don’t think they have gone away in terms of human expertise with IT; what has happened over the 30+ years is that there is a lot more “convergence” in IT so stuff tends to generally work better. A modern Windows PC works far better than the old ones. Also big companies have realised the “PC revolution” was largely illusory, due to the time wasted on the ground floor by a “local office boffin” helping everyone out, so there is centralised admin, preventing people screwing around with their PCs. Unfortunately, propping up all this, is a load of really sh1tty jobs in writing software for it all, especially server-side stuff which is a nightmare to write and then maintain over time.
Peter wrote:
Unfortunately, propping up all this, is a load of really sh1tty jobs in writing software for it all, especially server-side stuff which is a nightmare to write and then maintain over time.
Server side is the least nightmarey stuff to write! (The only stuff more fun to write is system-level software or device drivers). At least if you get to do it with language that’s designed for the job such as Java or C#. (Pity the poor fools who end up having to do it in a dynamically typed language like PHP or Python) If you’ve got no user interface to worry about, it’s far more fun. You can also do things like write automated test cases as it’s all inherently designed to be machine-to-machine interfaces, and foist off all the tedious user interface stuff to a front end guy, with a well-defined demarcation point at, say, your REST API :-)
