Title: A minor annoyance for some of us older folk is seeing so many &quot;digital help&quot; courses for seniors. All too often the spiel implies something like this: &quot;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...&quot;<p>Actually, some of us grew old <i>while</i> digital devices became ubiquitous. We&#x27;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.<p>What grates about the &quot;digital-help-for-seniors&quot; 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.<p>If you&#x27;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&#x27;t exist yet, but I suggest calling it OFUS - Old (Folks&#x2F;Farts) with Unix Skills. For starters, email me at unix@datafix.com.au.<p>FYI, I&#x27;m 77 and still work every day in a BASH shell (as a data auditor).
Upvote: