Only 5% of the US population is capable enough to "schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages."
Remember in the 90s, when teens were more tech savvy than adults, and everyone assumed that the savviest would just keep getting younger? Now it's 2017, and the people who were teens in the 90s are the most tech savvy generation and probably will be until they die.
Kids don't grow up with computers any more, they grow up with iPhones. If it's possible to learn to code on an iPhone, it's despite Apple's best efforts.
@mogwai_poet I think what makes an important difference between the 90s and now is that back then it was harder for kids to passively consume electronic content. As a result, we were more motivated to pursue creative use of our machines, be it coding, graphics etc. I do find it frustrating that great hardware products these days are better geared towards consumption than production. This is very much felt on iOS, especially if you also try not to rely on cloud services.
@mogwai_poet @bonf If anyone was that attached to their computer back then, it would mostly be nerds. Television was still the go-to passive medium of the 1990s. I personally feel like the nerds were trendsetters. I feel I was way ahead of my time in basically expecting to have an Internet connection everywhere and in expecting my computer to be my main source of entertainment.
@bonf @mogwai_poet I remember feeling like a huge nerd for asking the landlord of a place I was moving into if there was Internet access. I also distinctly remember having to install that on my own, and that was as late as 2001-2002. (I saw 9/11 happening on CNN while I was living there. Analog CRT TV with an aerial. Boy, how times have changed...)
@bonf @mogwai_poet Although there was only so much passive content to consume, there were plenty of games. Most kids I knew would play games. When they ran out of things to do on the computer, they'd turn it off and do other things. Remember that it wasn't common at the time to expect to be connected 24/7. You simply ran out of things to do on there and then you went and did other things.