Can you elaborate on what you told your father?

When i use google drive, the interface appears to be folder/file structure. Whether it is or is made to look that way is irrelevant, i suppose, as long as it works that way. I can also increase storage by downloading/deleting things so Im a bit flummoxed.

It’s ridiculous how complicated it’s gotten to answer my parents’ questions about stuff like this. The old desktop metaphors are gone. Screens are difficult for older eyes to read. Every app has a cloud service. Really seems like huge step back in usability.

Google drive follows the files and folders model that your father was expecting.

I'm probably old, but we used to learn DOS prompt basics (and folders and files and stuff) in what would be the equivalent of junior high school in the US. And not in special courses, it was "normal". Heck, I was even introduced to Microsoft Basic at school while in the equivalent of 4th grade on these funny Thomson MO5 computers.

But that's not what they are taught now. They are taught to use social media and cloud services, which is completely useless since they figured this out themselves already.

The education system here just keeps them early in a consumer mind state. It has absolutely no ambition and is just a race to the bottom.

I try not to get overly-annoyed at this kind of thing too, but to me it just demonstrates an incredible lack of self-drive, or curiosity, especially in the CS domain.

If the students are genuinely curious, there is nothing to stop them learning about pretty much any topic in CS - really. There are few university subjects where the entire syllabus is freely available online in almost every format imaginable the way CS often is, and very often the computer you already have works just fine to learn it on.

>I'd say half of my first-year CS students don't know how to create a folder with files, at the start of the school year.

I learned CS ~20 years ago and it was mostly the same. Half of the first year is people that are vaguely interested in computers, video games, or heard it was a good way to make money, and didn't really have any real skills going into it.

It is somewhat different now, because there are students that think they are good with technology but really have no idea how things work, they just think they know because they are slightly better than their peers at using phones and tablets.

Doesn’t Google Docs stores its files on Google Drive? What do they call the things they open to open an existing doc?

Sure, but I think the typical path for those who survive and strive in a CS program is to have touched a computer for the first time well before starting work on a college degree for it.

That's like trying to learn a foreign language by picking reading War and Peace in that language, without ever having seen a single translation to that language, or having already read War and Peace in your own. There are a lot of steps you need to take before then.

I would also be pretty surprised if a biology undergrad had never touched a microscope, possibly with the exception of the most impoverished among us. I imagine most people have tried one at some point along the K-12 journey, and there are more introductory treatments of e.g. life science on the way as well.

Starting CS without having "seen or touched" a computer would be like a biology undergrad who wouldn't be able to tell you whether a dog or a tree is a plant or animal.

>We do not reject new biology majors because they had never touched a microscope before entering the program.

No but you'd presumably make them take some remedial classes that the mainstream students wouldn't be required to take. Or maybe not, I'm not sure how it works in biology, but in the harder STEM majors, you're generally expected to have some basic knowledge beyond what the 'easy' track at high school required for graduation.

The difference is that these days the people are surrounded by computers and probably interact with a computer many hours every day, yet they are barely more tech savvy than that first lot who had never seen a computer before.

But so it goes when society moves forward.

If you're saying that at one point in history, a given cohort of new CS students had never seen or touched a computer, I have my doubts, but it depends on how you define CS program. Before computer science was a formalized education stream, it had a variety of other names like "Business Computing" or something related to information technology, but you'd have to go pretty far back imo before you find a whole classroom of entrants into such a program that had never seen or touched a computer. By the time it was called CS, I do find it a bit of a reach that you'd find less than say 10% of students opting into taking it without that low bar being passed.

Likewise the biology example seems strange; sure maybe people haven't used a microscope specifically (unlikely imo), but they very likely have used any number of other implements and taken at least one secondary school biology course

If you don't have a file manager on your system chances are you can figure out where downloads are going to.

Hyperbole. It wouldn't "break" all the web pages, they would simply render differently.

> the iOS Files app has allowed access to local files since 2019

Huh. I just opened my Files app on my iPhone 12 and went to On My iPhone (which was 2-3 more taps once arriving in the app). I don't see many of my files though, just a few. Some PDFs and a Spotify folder. But I don't see my pictures there? Or are pictures no longer stored as 'files'? Or do you mean that the app has allowed access only to some local user files? It's not all local files. And it's not all non-system local files. And it's not all user files. In fact it is missing > 99% of my user-space files (specifically ones created with default-OS applications on device, by the user).

And if I make a Note in the Notes app, will it show up as a file in the Files app? Probably not, I would guess. Because the note probably isn't really a file anyway. So pictures aren't files, and notes aren't files. What would a file be then? Are files only PDFs? That's the only thing that shows up for me. I guess PDFs are the only things that are files then!

Super confusing experience. I'm a mobile app developer by the way - on Android. Android sucks at this too of course. But the iOS Files app is much too limited to enable users to 'get' the concept of a file.

The five years since then haven’t been enough time to change 12 years of behavior.

That’s the website my high school used in engineering sciences classes to give students an introduction to HTML. I don’t see the point of your comment (I think it’s sarcasm, but I’m not even sure), can you be a little bit more constructive?

It's a bit of both, really. The typical computer or mobile user doesn't have general purpose computing knowledge or expertise. They don't know how their computer works or what any of the things in it ARE. They know how to follow a particular defined sequence of steps to get an outcome.

I worked over the phone tech support for a few years about 20 years ago, and it really opened my eyes to how far the gap is between the tech literate and everyday computer users.

I think this guide is terrific, for what it's worth. I just also think there's a lot more people out there that this guide SHOULD help, that it won't, because of that fundamental gap.

As does iOS, but the instructions given were for a desktop device.

It enables quirks mode when missing.