Old Folks with Unix Skills

Question

A minor annoyance for some of us older folk is seeing so many "digital help" courses for seniors. All too often the spiel implies something like this: "You grew old before digital devices became ubiquitous. Learn how to operate a smartphone or tablet, go online, send emails, share photos, shop online, join social media..."Actually, some of us grew old while digital devices became ubiquitous. We've been using digital devices for decades. The teenager who was programming in BASIC on a microcomputer is now in her 60s. That grey-haired 70-something might have been using UNIX at work every day in the 1980s.What grates about the "digital-help-for-seniors" programs is that they offer only a tiny subset of the learning we did and are still doing. For some of us, the nicest feature of general-purpose computing in the 2020s is the survival and ready availability of the command line, so we can do end-runs around complicated GUIs to get work done digitally.If you're one of the seniors to whom that last comment makes sense, do you think an online organisation of like-minded people sounds interesting? It doesn't exist yet, but I suggest calling it OFUS - Old (Folks/Farts) with Unix Skills. For starters, email me at unix@datafix.com.au.FYI, I'm 77 and still work every day in a BASH shell (as a data auditor).

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

How about people who remember RSTS/E or VM/CMS? (Guess we all switched to POSIX or Windows since those are the only games in town)

k310 · Answer

Sounds like the courses you are berating don't even rise to the level of "button pushers" that we mocked when they ran their Microsoft GUI's to do admin chores (and while we were converting thousands of files in one command, and do daily .. except that we are now converting (growl) webp files that can't be edited (not by GIMP anyway) )
Even so-called "computer savvy" young people just know which buttons to push, and nothing about doing something powerful that's not canned in some app.
I still would like to see people given the ability to CREATE (like they did with hypercard) and not just adapt to "change for the sake of change" features du jour.
Keeping it short for now.
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Airing of Grievances (must be Festivus already)
As an example, I am a seasoned Unix dinosaur, started on a Sun-2 workstation. I got so used to the crippled ios that when Apple FINALLY introduced (drum roll) FILES, I didn't know what to do with them. I got so used to workarounds.
And MacOS. Sheesh. Gotta do this: chsh -s /bin/bash
Here is a list of commands, some of which are unique to Apple
https://ss64.com/osx/

toast0 · Answer

OFUG (Old Folks Unix Group) perhaps?

1vuio0pswjnm7 · Answer

I work everyday in ash not bash. I think an organisation like this could achieve a great deal, I would love to start a non-profit of old-timers to teach the use of smaller, simpler software to do the tasks of today's larger software; UNIX is still an effective method of controlling computers, and looking around at what the largest companies and most consumers are using, it's also the most popular . There are few limits. Certainly no technical need for any of the 100+ MB programs ("apps") being written and dessiminated by programmers today. In discussions with seniors I have heard them tell me time and again the so-called "intuitive" applications pushed by today's "developers" are anything but "intuitive"; they are difficult to decipher and not-at-all simple on the inside.
Todays's GUIs look simplistic but if one looks at the source code, and often that source code remains off-limits for viewing, even for "free" software, for dubious reasons, one does not find any indications of simplification. Quite the opposite.
One thing I like about UNIX is that it does not "hide the ball". Generally, proprietary blobs aside, the entire system is open for examination. That includes every application.

MandieD · Answer

I'd love some material targeted towards people like my aunt (spent the 60s and 70s programming then designing and integrating systems for hospitals, then the 80s managing cattle breeding operations with dBASE) and my father-in-law (PhD mechanical engineer who worked for the German equivalent of ANSI until his retirement in the early 2000s, very comfortable with Windows CMD) to deal with the slick, ever-changing "discoverable" interfaces the kids I babysat for are imposing on us with every app or phone update.

rtchau · Answer

I got into the game "kinda late" (first PC ran DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1), and I still cherish and adore the CLI, and can't imagine it ever going away (if it does, a little piece of me will die with it). The look on the faces of a fresh crop of 20-something developers when you pull out a one-liner and/or some regex never gets old, and I still consider myself very unskilled compared to the folks who have lived and breathed bash/csh/zsh/tcsh etc for the past 30-40 years.That being said, how old is "Old"?

hnthrowaway0315 · Answer

Can we younger people join the fun and learn about retro techniques properly?(well I'm over 40 but I joined tech for only 5 years so kinda young)

poorbutdebtfree · Answer

Great idea! Also to be more inclusive and equitable there should be a parallel group: OBFUS, Old Black Folks with Unix Skills.