it hard to say what the searchers know..

we had a thread not to long ago on chauffers.. they used to be the "fire men" that keep a steam engine running on a steam car.. A man might drive his own car, but they were so unreliable, the chauffer, maintained the engine, repaired the flats, and then came to actually drive the car In the beginning, there was real prestige in 'driving' knowing how to work the machinery itself.

25 years ago, as the digit computer became available ( earlier computers were analog computers, with vacuum tubes were never user friendly sized) and a revolution started. the first computer users had to do everything.. there were no mice, no autostart's, at first, not even an autoexec.bat! by the early eighties, computers were becoming a fad, there were PC's and Apples, and Commadores, TRS80's, Osbornes, TI99/4A's a raft of different computers, many with some fundimental differences. some like the commadore, TRS, and Osborns used intel's 8086 chip(it later gave rise to 80286, later the (80)386, (80)486, Pentium, Pentium plus, and so on. Apples used a different chip, and so did the TI99/4A.
with different operating systems come different versions of basic, and other early programing languages..

owning a computer in the early 1980 was a for hobbiest, and people who were genuinely interested in them. (yeah, i got mine in 1982) You had to know stuff, like about registers, or bits, you often had to type in your own programs.. because they had not yet standardize floppies and floppy formats (now day, both Apple/Mac &PC use the same formate for disks.. back then they didn't so you bought unformated disk, and formated them for yourself) and size (you might know DD/SS as different day/same s***, but it used to mean double density/single sided.. but you could also have single density, double sided, and ds/dd.

by 1982 floppies did mean the 5.25 inch media storage formate, (the old 8 inch square disks where things of the past.--yeah, the first floppies where the size of sheet of paper, and didn't hold much more that a few pages worth of text!

Flash to today. there are old timers like me, who know boolian because we actually used it, long ago, in the deep dark computer past. we actualy did things like signal trace, or debug by using boolian. we knew how many registers we he had to work with, and how many bytes, and we knew memory address-sometimes in hex, sometimes in octal, sometimes in binary.
then there are users like my ex, who really likes AOL (i am not a charter aol user, but i started with a long time ago, after 3 other isp providers failed, and i wanted something stable. Is is my back up now, i think of getting someone to host my own site, and registering a domain name, and maybe, at the end of the summer, when i move i will.
but there are many like my ex.. who like aol because he doesn't actually have to know anything to use it..
he likes aol keywords... so much easier than doing a search.
he doesn't like google.. it seems to complecated.. yahoo has all those menu choices.. its easy..

he took a sabatical, and became a NYC certified computer teacher.. and he learned how to teach basic. (not vb, but basic) he teaches kids to write a program in basic, a tic tac toe program.. that is the only program he can write.

he know, and can define terms like bits and bytes, and binary, he might even recognize a hex number if he saw one..

but, fact is, he now loves playing with his computer, and going on line and chatting and looking at the manchester gaurdian on line.. all the math and logic, he doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and he is very happy and for his purposes, a very skilled user.

There were four of us, ex, me, and two kids.. and today, even though we had a home computer in the house starting in the fall of 1982, the are four levels of users. My son is total professional, and knows perl, unix, linex, and a score of other languages. he writes web pages for a living.

i am a seat of the pants solid technical person. i teach adults to use software, and develop little things.. buttons and other user friendly interface components. My daughter is a skilled user of applications. she is project co-ordinator (one of 4 working with project manager) on an international project. (an admin aid/secretary position really for all of its glorified title.) my ex, is an aol fan.

we all own and use computers 3 of us have a PDA, and i have an psion, a PDA that is a full pocket sized computer (an 8086 actually!-- just like back in the early 80's) my son has a three computer household, and for awhile, had a network, running on a Sun system. i think we are about normal. nowdays more than 70%of households at our income level have PC's. our abilities cover a far range.

BB users, are in general, slightly more skilled. most here, at awad, tend to have a need/desire to learn. so your comment, I meant that when doing a search the searcher themselves doesn't always consciously use AND, NOT, or OR, for example - is true. because they don't know how.. they either learn, because they want to, or they learn to use tools like AOL's keywords, and have smaller but easier choices.

there is no right or wrong..


my other obsession