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Comment by deeblering4 | Hacker News Reader

> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.

I know that this is a joke, but let's remember to be inclusive and kind to our younger readers and take the time to explain (reiterate even) what pieces of old tech are, and what they were used for.

Computers have a long and complicated history. And the technical parts are being abstracted away more and more.

I think it's important to help people understand how we got to where we are today, and why it is (or isn't) an improvement from the way things used to be.

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> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.

>> I know that this is a joke, but let's remember to be inclusive and kind to our younger readers and take the time to explain (reiterate even) what pieces of old tech are, and what they were used for.

Expect it's not even funny, it's just super cringey and reeks of gatekeeping and condescension.

This attitude is why I never finished Thimbleweed Park, it’s full of “hey remember when it was the late eighties/early nineties, wasn’t it better then” jokes and it just wore the whole thing thin for me.

Thimbleweed Park has a setting to turn on/off the "annoying in-jokes". Maybe that could help?

(I personally enjoyed the jokes)

Whats funny to me about this too is that retro gamers come in all ages and would probably think this guys an idiot for writing something like that. "Youngsters" who would even be interested in this article probably already know about Monkey Island, at least theres a good chance. I wouldnt underestimate younger gamers, I know some that know more than me about games I know like the back of my hand.

I know that this is a joke

It's humor not a joke. There's deep wonderment at how much the world has changed behind it. A 16GB thumb drive holds 10,000 times more information. A floppy disk doesn't even have the most rudimentary electronics built in. You can't even turn one on.

The problematic part is "for the younger readers out there." Leave that out and it's fine. Replace it with "Fuck, I'm old" and it's pretty good.

Technical articles are (well) technical and the author is not responsible for explaining what a floppy disk is in a world where google and wikipedia are eleven keystrokes away. The reader has to work too.

He should of said he 3d printed the save icons

I hate this stereotype. "Hurr durr, stupid Millenials don't even know what a book is, amirite?"

I think it's more a moment of realisation that a lot of time has passed, that things have changed to such an extent, and that it's hard to imagine something so large having so little function, relative to today's tech. I don't think it's written in the spirit of the stereotype you suggest.

Millenials aren't even young anymore

Yeah this type of curmudgeon sarcasm is how you end up with "Ok, boomer".

I feel a better way to be jokey about the old tech, is to just be amazed at it. Folks know how to google something when they don't know what it is

I like that.

Those four disks cost less than $1 each, and each individual one holds over one million bytes? Amazing.

They sound so useful that I bet people built whole collections of them, including devices just for organizing and protecting.

I can even imagine a hobby industry of unneeded tools for dealing with them.

Kind of a patronising comment in itself, as if the poor little snowflakes are so weak that they'll run away from tech after an extremely minor bit of ribbing at their expense.

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