Kids react to Old Computers

[Lord Gaben]

I'm almost tempted to buy old DOS computers for my kids to learn on (or Raspberry Pi, something really low powered). Still remember the one I had in the early 90s. MS-DOS 3.x, iirc. Not as primitive as the Apple II, but still. 

 

Kids don't appreciate the power of technology D:

Why not drop them into a Linux command line

[Guest]

Why not drop them into a Linux command line

YES!!!!

[felixbearpig]

The people who are "sad ". And "disappointed " Are mostly idiots. How do you expect 6-11 year olds to know how to use a Walkman, use a non-dail tone phone and especially a command prompt line? I'm 22 years old. The earliest memory of a computer I have is a windows 95 pc with dial up Internet and back then I still didn't need to know how to use a command promt. Why go back to older tech? Can you blame their parents ? No you can't , would you teach you child about that tech ? Chances are you would Becuase you are an enthusiasts. The .00001% of the population

[Guest]

The people who are "sad ". And "disappointed " Are mostly idiots. How do you expect 6-11 year olds to know how to use a Walkman, use a non-dail tone phone and especially a command prompt line? I'm 22 years old. The earliest memory of a computer I have is a windows 95 pc with dial up Internet and back then I still didn't need to know how to use a command promt. Why go back to older tech? Can you blame their parents ? No you can't , would you teach you child about that tech ? Chances are you would Becuase you are an enthusiasts. The .00001% of the population

Umm... they weren't all six to eleven and I knew all those things with we exception of the command prompt line when I was their age and that was only 4 years ago (i'm 15). Also most of my friends who wouldn't recognize a motherboard if you threw it at them knows what these things are. I don't care if they know how to use it I was just shocked that they didn't recognize it. Also 0.00001% of the populations is approximately 70,000 people.

[rashdanml]

Why not drop them into a Linux command line

That's the general idea. 

[theawesomejman]

1. I'm just going to take very wild guess here, that most of these kids, if not all, will probably use either a laptop, or a smartphones or a tablet. PC's in general, and also Gaming PC's, are becoming less and less popular at home, and to be honest, if you're not doing anything productive or game some very demanding titles and just use a computer of any sort to type a letter, e - mail or browse the internet, I don't see any reason as of why I should bother about getting a PC. It's not only in some cases more expensive, but also requires space, not to mention that a PC is not portable. So I could ask you the question of why to assume, that they have a PC at home. But coming back to the initial point, laptops etc. start with a press on one button, and maybe that's why they were a little overwhelmed.

 

2. Really? Unless a program requires a restart, Windows updated itself or I've installed a new driver, I don't have to restart the PC at all. I cannot remember the last time I had to restart my PC for a game to finish installing, let alone to play it. That again proves my guess, that they're mostly use tablets or smartphones at home, because you don't need to do that, but again even for laptops or PC that point is pretty weak to me and really just in 9 out of 10 times nonesense.

 

3. And what point did they "insult" it, not to mention that you cannot insult a thing, but whatever? They simply said, that they're glad, that they don't have to go through that hassle anymore and would never use such a thing again, and that doesn't insult anything, but rather compliments our achievements in the field of technology, that we're able to have 850x the computing power in the grip of our hand. And since some of them even said that, that proves your point as invalid again. But even then, why being disappointed by it? These kids were born AFTER the millenium, they don't know any better. The internet and technology was evolving and stil is evolving so fast, that the kids that are born in the next 3 years probably won't remember a thing about something like a CD or DVD. They will grow up with on - demand services. They will not understand, that we had special devices to playback a disk to watch a movie and of course that seems "stupid" to them, but only because they don't know any better.

 

I guess, what we can take away from this is, that you should stop acting so "shocked" and "disappointed" and rather see, that these kids are young and have grown up in a world, where things are easier, which often isn't a bad thing.

Fair points, however after watching the Bonus reactions several kids say and I quote: "If you can even call that technology, whatever it is"

 

I don't expect anything from them, they are kids after all. 

 

All I'm saying is we should be teaching them to be a little more understanding of past technologies and understand the effort, the sheer work that was put into NOT having that "piece of junk" be what your grand kids have when they are your age, all we have is because someone else strived to get there in the first place, they can stay with their technology and that's not a bad thing, but if they can't understand how we got from that to what we have now, then what hope do we have for future innovation?

[theawesomejman]

The people who are "sad ". And "disappointed " Are mostly idiots. How do you expect 6-11 year olds to know how to use a Walkman, use a non-dail tone phone and especially a command prompt line? I'm 22 years old. The earliest memory of a computer I have is a windows 95 pc with dial up Internet and back then I still didn't need to know how to use a command promt. Why go back to older tech? Can you blame their parents ? No you can't , would you teach you child about that tech ? Chances are you would Becuase you are an enthusiasts. The .00001% of the population

People like you lack vision of the future.

 

At it's very core these videos are just social experiments to test how a certain age group demographic will react to a certain stimuli, in this case old technology.

 

Now they can be utterly useless at manipulating the stuff, that's fine. I don't expect them to play well with technology they didn't grow up with, that their grand parent grew up with.

 

However the minimum that I do expect is an admiration of how we went from THAT to what we have now, a rotary phone to a hand-held mobile phone, see it's the people that realize how amazing that is that will take the next step into the future.

 

If we went from that to this, imagine what we can get to from what we have now.

 

We are settling on technology, an internal "that's good enough", "that's as good as we can do". But if that's what our predecessors had thought, then we would be nowhere near as advanced as we are.

 

So tl;dr pick up the pace and don't settle. Admire something for what it stands for, not how it works today. And think of what we can achieve in the next big jump.

[Calavera]

Please name one good reason why you brought national dislike into a video on children of today not knowing how to use the computer of yesterday.

 

Also, you're telling me every one of TheFineBros react videos are scripted? Every single one? I don't believe that, nor do I believe this one is. I reacted like this when my parents showed me logarithm books and told me they had to use that instead of a calculator.

Children aren't supposed to react like this, it's the way people are thaught to act which I hate.

[Imaginaerum]

Children aren't supposed to react like this, it's the way people are thaught to act which I hate.

And what was wrong with the way they reacted? If we ever invent space travel for the masses I can't imagine what those kids are going to think when they hear we used to go 80MPH in gas powered cars to get around.

[LarsReviews]

Could I use the QBasic language to input commands on that computer?

[soup]

I am very biased as I am 51, when I was  at that age (6~14?) NOBODY had home computers.

First contact with a computer was using THE Lothian high schools computer. It came around once per month and had to be programed with punch cards.  First computer I used was a Commodore PET 2001(no hard drive, programs had to be loaded from casette tape) first main frame I used was a DEC 20 first PC at home (that was the one that had the hard drive stuffed in with paper) had a 40 Meg (yes Meg) hard drive and 4MEG of RAM it also had a seperate mouse board still ran Windows 3.1 which had a GUI never had to use (at home,unless I wanted too) a CLI

 

The first computer I had in this house worked on Windows XP (12 years ago) so most of those kids were born after XP was the default operating system. At that sort of age I was more interested in 'biscuits and jumping'(© Russel Howard) than using 40 year old stuff. 

This was a bit like me bieng shown a valve wireless set from the start of the war and comparing it with the TV set of the 70s or those kids being shown an old Dansette record player and comparing it to an MP3 player..  I can appreciatte them not having a clue as to what to do .  I do agree with some other posters that some of the reactions seem scripted and (American or not) those kids can't act

[FullNuclearBreakfast]

I think my grandpa has an Apple II in his loft, I might have to go and play around with it

 

The first computer I ever used was this crappy eMachines thing running XP, with 256MB of RAM and an Intel Celeron D. Oh, and a MASSIVE 30GB HDD (IDE of course). I've still got it, actually, but it's currently in bits. I'm still pretty grateful for us Mum getting that computer - not only did it get me into using computers from a pretty early age, it also got me into PC gaming. I remember playing through Dark Forces II on there, as well as Half-Life more recently. Damn, it also helped me learn about computer hardware - I've disassembled and reassembled it dozens of times (and it took me years to figure out how to take off the heatsink - it was some weird clip design).

 

I love old hardware... I'm semi-considering buying a broken 9800 GX2 for use as a coaster

[Calavera]

And what was wrong with the way they reacted? If we ever invent space travel for the masses I can't imagine what those kids are going to think when they hear we used to go 80MPH in gas powered cars to get around.

I am not talking about the reaction to old stuff, I am talking about the way they are taught to dramatize things, to act like a woman from a reality show or something. 

[TetraSky]

Man, things were unintuitive back then... Thank God I wasn't born in that era... First PC was a Pentium 3 computer with Windows 98SE (updated to XP later on), had it for a long time, could play Halo 1 on it, after upgrading the initial 64MB of RAM to 192MB. (Though I did have another PC before that, based on DOS, nobody knew how to use it so we got rid of it quickly, I was like, 7 or 8)

Totally agree with the kid that says it's better than flappy bird though.

[soup]

Totally agree with the kid that says it's better than flappy bird though.

Having root canal work without anesthetic is better than flappy bird.

[rentaspoon]

Not surprising. I'm 25 and my starter days were with Windows NT/95 which were a gui based os. But I did have access to Windows 1.0/2.0 machines which were a tad different. I'm expecting to see a kids going hipster in here saying they are pros at dos.

DOS + Window 3.14 was my first, we had the internet when a majority of websites where home made pages ( atleast I remember it that way)

I REMEMBER HAVING TO BUY A NEW CD DRIVE BECAUSE IT DIDN'T SPIN FAST ENOUGH

[EmotionalSloth]

Why are people getting mad at this? They are just kids, give them a break

[-iSynthesis]

Well, considering that some of these kids were born in the days where we had the first Dual Core CPU's and Windows XP, what do you expect? You probably wouldn't react any differently, if you grew up knowing only tablets and smartphones.

Some of these kids are even below 7 Years old, meaning they were born AFTER Windows Vista was launched.

 

It's just what they're used to and even I would find it a little tedious doing this type of stuff and I still know the days of floppy disks very well!

I feel proud knowing DOS with my 14 years :-) kind of.

[Homicidium]

I feel proud knowing DOS with my 14 years :-) kind of.

 

Well, "knowing" and "knowing how to use it" are two different things. Some of these kids will probably still knows Windows XP, another thing that factors in is, that you have an interest in PC's and everything related to that and automatically have bigger knowledge about that specific field, something they probably don't have because they're simply not interested in this.

[rentaspoon]

Why are people getting mad at this? They are just kids, give them a break

I think they've forgotten they are kids? My boy would use that pc for 5 minutes and go back to angry birds.

Personally with what DOS was like I wouldn't blame him

[soup]

Why are people getting mad at this? They are just kids, give them a break

 

I am not upset that they think it is an old steaming pile of... .   What does get me is those scripted over-the-top reactions

[rentaspoon]

I am not upset that they think it is an old steaming pile of... . What does get me is those scripted over-the-top reactions

You should spend a day with my son..... and not like that.

[-iSynthesis]

Well, "knowing" and "knowing how to use it" are two different things. Some of these kids will probably still knows Windows XP, another thing that factors in is, that you have an interest in PC's and everything related to that and automatically have bigger knowledge about that specific field, something they probably don't have because they're simply not interested in this.

That...is true

[ViruZ_HUN]

I am borned in 1999 and I WANT THIS PC, if i ofc can get it for free:D always fun to learn old tech:D

 

Oldest PC i used, The only stuff i remember that it used Windows 98 and Floppy, specs i know nothing

[soup]

You should spend a day with my son..... and not like that.

 

I have two sons (21&20 now) of my own and they were never as 'dramatic' as that.