Older Millenial here. It was definitely GenX that paved the way for the computer world I learned, and it was mostly GenX who wrote the books and taught the lessons (often informal) that brought us what knowledge we have, at least in the beginning. Plus a small selection of exceptional individuals from older generations, including, dare I say it,… the baby boomers.

Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, etc. are marketing bullshit that need to stop being used in the common lexicon.

Oh you know computers? Name every group policy.

• The lowest level is transistors, which are electronic switches that have an on and off state. In other words, they are binary and can represent 0 and 1
• Those get combined into gates of two inputs. An “and” gate outputs 1 if both its inputs are 1. An “or” gate outputs 1 if either of its inputs are 1. And Xor gate outputs 1 if and only if one of its inputs is 1.
• A bunch of other complicated shit happens
• Boom assembly. Don’t try and read or write it, because it will make you wanna quit computers
• C comes into play. Designed to unfuck, assembly so you can actually write readable code. Just don’t forget to release your memory
• More complicated shit. Something about kernels and GNU. Userland vs kernel land? Idk
  • ARM might be different since it can run process outside of userland and kernel I think? Something about secure compute/marketing BS
• Inside of user land, we have the web browser. This is there the cool shit happens.
• The browser runs JavaScript, CSS and HTML. JavaScript is a single threaded, but nonblocking language with an even loop and microtask queue.
• Inside of the browser we run React. React is a framework where UI is a function of state and the data flows in one direction. It can also be used to slam your CPU.
• Now that we’re into high level languages, it would only be fun if it looped back around to the beginning. So we invoke some C code that has been compiled to web assembly. Mmmm how efficient

Edit: I tried to do this all off the top of my head. After writing this, I think I meant user space vs kernel space. Idk if user land is a word

Fuck you Windows

Did a solid effort.

There is a big difference between having the people who invented something and being the people who families (and companies...) depend on to keep them running. This being about the latter.

Or, at least, in my family, we tended to not tell the engineers at Ampex to get their butts downstairs because dad didn't understand why the color was off on the football game he recorded last night

I guess between C and assembly there’s abstract syntax trees and maybe LLVM, which is probably also written in C. Idk I skipped compilers in college.

I also know the networking stack has a bunch of layers, but that felt like its own separate thing to “computers”. I think UDP makes more errors than TCP but UDP also go brrrrr

Damn, you're good. Enjoy your lifetime of trimming Satan's pubic hair!

Nice !

Machin code comes to mind, and "more" high level languages like C++, template metaprogramming and other horror stories

And CD players!

Cheers

When I joined the company maintaining Unix, I was one of the younger ones. It's older X who knows how it's all built; because they did it.

By that logic, Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak were Boomers so Boomers all know how to fix computers.

Let's face it, "generational" assumptions are all too coarse to be valuable - and are probably just another way to separate and divide us all so we stop thinking about how to take down the ruling classes.

Ahhh I see. So what you're saying is that Gen X is actually the root of our problems? Boomers were just another symptom that needed a GUI.

Oh, but not "Boomer" so you can still say "Ok, Boomer?"

They should just be numbered. From best to worst, so Millenials would be 1 and Boomers would be like... 6? 7? How many generations have we had

Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge.

Idk if I’ve laughed this hard in a while

Once a week my coworker is like, this code has been working for years so we don’t touch it

Sauce? I just make stuff and opine freely. I think none of that is bullshit, but I'll debate it on a case-by-case.

That’s cool. We’re used to being forgotten and this way nobody will ask us to fix their computer.

Its almost like the "generations" are mostly arbitrary with a lot of overlap

I literally just fixed a zoomers laptop last night. Lol

My impression of C++ is that’s it’s actually C++++++++ as in, how many more decades of features can we cram into this language before it explodes

What’s a CD player /s

Fun fact about a random CD player. The USB-A external CD player Apple sold after removing the internal CD player kinda abused the USB standard. I believe it needed more current than was allowed by USB, so Apple found some way to make this specific device draw more power than the USB standard supported at the time. Today, I believe USB-C includes a handshake that negotiates power requirements, but at the time, USB-A didn’t support this.

Tbh, I don’t really know where assembly ends and machine code starts. But do know that assembly is tied to your specific architecture