Technology

The first PC my family had, and thus first computer I had extensive experience with, was a Dell Pentium 4 running XP. Yeah, obviously I used a file system implicitly, but I remember thinking later when I entered college and the workforce that I was deprived of learning how to use a "real" computer because I didn't get to experience the consumer PCs of the 80s. I didn't have experience with a C64, I didn't need to learn BASIC or a command line just to use the computer. As a user, understanding how reads and writes to disk happened, and how to make the best use of my working memory wasn't necessary, the OS handled it all. I just needed to know to click "eject" first. And yet I'm doing fine (I think :D).

My point is, every generation will be able to say "I grew up with a dumbed down computing experience". But I'm more optimistic about this I think. I welcome a generation of computer scientists who think completely differently about how files should be organized. It's not important that I know BASIC, and maybe it's not important that today's students think in terms of file systems. They're still smart people, they'll still need to learn trees and graphs to solve problems. They just won't be pre-programmed with assumptions and requirements that may not exist anymore or in future hardware.