this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine::Google accused DOJ of aiming to force people to use “inferior” search products.

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[–] agent_flounder@lemmy.one 10 points 1 year ago

Lots of people of my gen were utterly clueless about computers growing up-- it was arcane nerd shit.

You didn't have to know how to use a computer until much later in life in a number of careers.

Hell, my university still had rentable typewriters in the library, which still had a physical card catalog (alongside the new computerized one), and we still wrote tests by hand (essay or otherwise). Laptops weren't a thing. And not everyone had a PC/Mac. The Internet was something most students were oblivious to. The web was only just in its infancy and only the nerds knew about it as a curious novelty. Hell, there wasn't even DNS back then. Everyone downloaded a "hosts" file.

Even so, I'm still struggling to imagine how a person still doesn't know the difference between a search engine and a browser, though.

Then again, I suppose some people are just really awful at analytical thinking -- understanding how to decompose complex things. Understanding how the parts and pieces work. The people who were really bad at that kind of thing probably would have steered clear of computers as much as possible.

So, ok, maybe if a person avoids computers in undergrad and law school in the 90s then becomes a lawyer, they can just actively avoid computers in their job. That's one career where maybe that's possible because, by the time computers become truly ubiquitous, your assistants that can do the computer stuff for you.