Parents are so cute!

msdos622wasfun · 09 Jun 2010

Hi everyone.

Anybody else here have a mom and dad that are, well, shall we say, just "not into" computers as much as the rest of us, so that when an ad for Windows 7 is shown on TV, they will literally ask, "So what IS Windows 7 anyways?"

Hehehe. I love my parents dearly. But I think this kind of question has come up before. I usually try to summarize it in the simplest terms that I can think of, such as, "Well, it's called an 'operating system' ... it's the basic software you need to run your computer before you can do anything else with it."

How do you guys respond to non-techie people when they ask basic questions like that?

(DISCLAIMER: I certainly don't know everything about everything either!)

rerice · 09 Jun 2010

If you will think back, I'm sure you will remember when you did not know the difference between a desktop and a keyboard.

Give your parents credit! They gave you life and ( Probably your first computer)

Just wait a few years. As I recall I was amazed how much my parents had learned after I grew up.

Dinesh · 09 Jun 2010

My mom thinks I use computer only for playing games. Whatever I do, email, online, etc. she thinks I m just playing some game. :)

msdos622wasfun · 09 Jun 2010

Heck, I certainly don't look down on them because of trivial stuff like that. We all had to start somewhere -- they know things that I don't and vice-versa. I assure them that if they really wanted to, I could easily teach them the basics of surfing online. They just don't have the same interest in it that I do. Although, they're coming around -- more and more they realize how valuable a tool like the Internet is, because they often ask me to look things up for them.

But hey, I can easily provide anecdotes of my lack of knowledge in my early computer years. For instance:

1. Once on my Apple ][, I confused INIT (which formats a disk) with SAVE, and I ended up erasing an entire floppy.
2. When I first started getting into IBM PC compatible clones, I didn't know what a hard drive was. My friend told me that there is a 20 MB "hard disk" inside the machine. Huh? How can there be some kind of large disk inside the computer?
3. When I first heard about structured programming, I thought it was impossible to write programs without line numbers (this is what dabbling exclusively in Applesoft BASIC for several years does to you).

ryo · 09 Jun 2010

Dinesh said:

My mom thinks I use computer only for playing games. Whatever I do, email, online, etc. she thinks I m just playing some game. :)

maybe your kind or your face draw that's you're gamers... lol