> I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid.
I think that's only true if that "proportionally" means "proportional to the number of people who have to work with computers on a daily basis".
I don't know exactly when you were a kid, but from the ZX Spectrum comment, I'd guess it was in the early 1980s. I guarantee you more people, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to the total population, know concrete things about how computers work now than did then. Huge percentages of the population of the world had never even seen a computer when the ZX Spectrum was current. Computer Science curriculum (and related fields) was still, relatively speaking, in its infancy, and the number of institutions that even had anything that could be reasonably termed a functioning CS (or, again, related) department was fairly small.
Today, yes, there are a lot of people who know very little about how computers work, even though nearly everyone (especially in the Western world) uses computers on a daily basis. There are even a lot of people with tech-related degrees who don't know the full ins and outs of how computers work even at a medium level of abstraction.
But there are so many more people who have had the opportunity to learn about computers because of their ubiquity. There are so many more people who have, either through formal education or otherwise, learned how an operating system loads drivers, or how a file system manages space, or how a program allocates and frees memory, than in the early 1980s.
I believe what you are seeing is the difference between a world where, when there was someone you could talk to about computers at all, they had to know how they worked in order to use them effectively, and a world where computers are so widespread everyone uses them, and so user-friendly that the vast majority of people never need to know or care how to do anything remotely like changing the jumpers on a SCSI drive or the dip switches on a sound card.
I don't think this is true, at least in the UK. The BBC computer literacy project meant that there were BBC Model Bs in every UK school, with tie-in educational materials. In the early 90s my entire class at a run of the mill state primary school took turns pair-programming LOGO on the school's BBC Micro. I don't think you can get more ubiquitous than every single human having programmed a loop and subroutine.
I think that's only true if that "proportionally" means "proportional to the number of people who have to work with computers on a daily basis".
I don't know exactly when you were a kid, but from the ZX Spectrum comment, I'd guess it was in the early 1980s. I guarantee you more people, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to the total population, know concrete things about how computers work now than did then. Huge percentages of the population of the world had never even seen a computer when the ZX Spectrum was current. Computer Science curriculum (and related fields) was still, relatively speaking, in its infancy, and the number of institutions that even had anything that could be reasonably termed a functioning CS (or, again, related) department was fairly small.
Today, yes, there are a lot of people who know very little about how computers work, even though nearly everyone (especially in the Western world) uses computers on a daily basis. There are even a lot of people with tech-related degrees who don't know the full ins and outs of how computers work even at a medium level of abstraction.
But there are so many more people who have had the opportunity to learn about computers because of their ubiquity. There are so many more people who have, either through formal education or otherwise, learned how an operating system loads drivers, or how a file system manages space, or how a program allocates and frees memory, than in the early 1980s.
I believe what you are seeing is the difference between a world where, when there was someone you could talk to about computers at all, they had to know how they worked in order to use them effectively, and a world where computers are so widespread everyone uses them, and so user-friendly that the vast majority of people never need to know or care how to do anything remotely like changing the jumpers on a SCSI drive or the dip switches on a sound card.