My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.

  • whofearsthenight
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Sort of. Macs were doing this in the 80’s but they were super expensive. Still a popular option for schools, though. Growing up, we usually had Apple II’s in class (88-93ish) with Macs in some classrooms. It wasn’t until around the '95 era or just before that home computers became affordable, so it’s probably most people’s major exposure to GUI computing. Prior to '95, if you had a computer in the home, it was probably DOS-based and you maybe used WIn3.1. But Win3.1 wasn’t great, and quite a lot of home computers at this time were too underpowered to do much running it, so although I had access to Win3.1, in practice even at about 10yrs old, I just booted to DOS and often had to run programs off of floppies because HDD space was super limited and very expensive. When '95 dropped, it was definitely a paradigm shift in my house to go to that being the primary interface instead of DOS.

    • Joe@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      OS/2 had a following back then too. I was running BBS software on it, around the time of Win95’s release. I’d started dabbling with Linux, but h/w compatibility was an issue back then - I ran it without X for a year or so, and it beat DOS in many ways. When I got X working, OS/2 lost most of its value to me. I do remember missing REXX though.