There’s often a skill that seem interesting, but I can’t see doing anything for me in my day-to-day life. What have you learned that was a lot more effort than the payoff was worth?
There’s often a skill that seem interesting, but I can’t see doing anything for me in my day-to-day life. What have you learned that was a lot more effort than the payoff was worth?
As an old time computer nerd I have uncountable examples of deprecated knowledge. There is no use in knowing how to use the reserved upper memory in autoexec.bat and config.sys, nor how to use Napster or Kazaa.
But all these skills do shape your brain and way of thinking.
Assembly language taught me to be precise and think before typing. Flash taught me that nothing lasts forever, as big as it might seem.
Eventually, all this adds up and creates a profile that is very demanded in my career.
That said, my mom taught me to thread a needle without looking. And I can’t sew, so that’s that.
I had to learn himem.sys and loadhigh when I was about 10 years old and the family PC HDD crashed. I had a copy of DOS and a manual the size of a phone book. The only way out was to write my own boot disk.
But yes, these days it’s a bit of a useless skill.
Yeah and to think we had to learn and find out stuff reading a book. A book!!
While knowledge like that is deprecated, the foundational skills and problem-solving it gave you are still very valuable. Modern systems are still built upon old roads, so people with this base level of knowledge have a far easier time sorting out what fixes are needed. Like being an old mechanic that diagnoses a car issue almost immediately because they can hear the issue without hooking up a digital diagnostic, they already know what to look for.
I miss older computers, lol. 2000-2010-ish was the golden era.