Students don't know what files and folders are, professors say

I started a masters course in mathematics in 1992. It was a joint course between two universities. We had Unix machines at one of them. We were being prepared for stuff like learning Fortran. We were told to copy files from a source directory to our own folders. We were given proper instructions. I remarked to the guy next to me that I was sure there was some underlying logic to all this, even though it didn't make much sense initially.

Of course, I eventually grasped the notion of directory structures, and even that peculiar little concept called "pipes".

I had done a tiny bit of pascal programming as part of my undergraduate course in the mid-80's, but I can't remember much about it. We used an editor called "pie ed", or something. (Can anyone name what machines I would have been using? It would have been some client-server architecture, but I couldn't say what).

After a couple of years at my job (between my undergraduate degree and masters), they eventually introduced computers. Each set of client records was kept on a separate floppy. Those big-arsed ones, not the small ones).

I had things like the ZX81 and Acorn Electron, but they had no directory structure.

So back when I was a young pup, we really didn't run into things like directories.

That was the 80's and early 90's though, when men were men, women were women, and "program patch" meant sellotape.

To think that pupils are coming out of secondary schools not knowing what a directory is is unforgivable. Just what the hell are they teaching kids with computers these days, then?

Very misleading title. The claim actually articulated in the article is that kids these days make heavy use of search functions and thus tend not to organize their files into subfolders. Nowhere in the article is there anything about students being unware of the ability to do this, nor any indication that students don't know what files and directories are. If anything, the article claims it is in fact the professors who are only now coming to appreciate the utility of search functions.

> And Garland, the astrophysicist teaching an engineering course, has started using her PC's search function to find files in the same way her students do. "I'm like, huh ... I don’t even need these subfolders," she said.