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Comment by NikolaeVarius | Hacker News Reader

I have a buddy who teaches technology to young kids.

He complains all the time about how he can't assume that kids know anything fundamental about computers.

Things such as manually saving files go above kids heads since the modern auto-save is so ubiquitous. Kids assume that all monitors are touch screen at first and will poke the screen before touching the KB&M.

File directories might as well be a magical black box. Good luck trying to get anyone to figure out how to print something if the default printer doesn't immediately work.

He wants to help, but is always shocked at how much kids simply do not know any of the primitives of a computer

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> Kids assume that all monitors are touch screen at first

That happened to me with my 2 year old at the local library. I spent a few minutes showing him how to use the mouse. Then he touched the screen… and it worked. FML, the computer had a touch screen and a mouse.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

Alfred North Whitehead

I'm sure Alfred North Whitehead wasn't advocating stuff like not teaching the fundamentals of the why and how we can make these abstractions.

> I'm sure Alfred North Whitehead wasn't advocating stuff like not teaching the fundamentals of the why and how we can make these abstractions.

I’m sure he wasn't advocating it so much as recognizing that it was inherently, inevitably, and universally a consequence of progress.

In 2nd-6th grade school in late 80s we had to learn to program (logo) which was great fun. We had to get a perfect on a 100 question computer test to graduate 6th grade. RAM vs ROM vs Disk drive sort of questions. Not fun. At the time I complained endlessly because I kept getting 97 or so.

Wow did that set me up for success in the future.

This was private Christian grade school. Way ahead on the tech curve compared to most schools.

100% is ridiculous.

But perhaps maybe tests like that can get people to stop referring to non-volatile storage as "memory".

Is that wrong ? Often I see RAM refered as memory with nonvolatile memory being reffered as storage.

Also there are old (ferite core) and new (NVRAM) technologies that are more or less both, further blurring the distinction.

> Is that wrong ?

Yes.

> Often I see RAM refered as memory with nonvolatile memory being reffered as storage.

That would be the correct nomenclature.

> Also there are old (ferite core) and new (NVRAM) technologies that are more or less both, further blurring the distinction.

The distinction isn't based on how it's built, but the use case and volatility. Memory is volatile and only intended for storing data for actively running programs.

SSDs and NVMe drives are storage, despite them looking like RAM chips, because they are non-volatile. When you remove power, they still have the data. A mobile device's "flash memory", which despite being called "memory", is storage.

Tell IBM in 1955. "Magnetic cores are attractive as memory elements because they are small, fast, and they provide non-volatile storage."[1]

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US2778005A/en

I don't much agree with the RAM = "memory" thing. "Memory" colloquially is for remembering things. RAM and storage are both for the computer to remember things, so it's natural to think they are both memories. It adds to the confusion that there are "memory cards" that employ "flash memory", the same tech that powers SSDs, which is nowadays a primary way of doing storage.

If you think about it, RAM is short term memory, and storage is long term memory, no?

In my school (3rd world country, but expensive school), we had to draw the flag of our country (stripes, circles) with QBasic in MS-DOS.

This would have been around 1997. I remember complaining because I had an older sibling at the same school, and all they had to do was draw the flag in MS Paint.

I have a friend who teaches classes at a technical college. During the day one of the classes is a programming class for high schoolers. He said that none of the kids knew what a file was when he tried to get them to open or save something.

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