It seems to be a per-school kind of thing. I am late millennial/early Gen Z, and my school had computer classes where we learned how to use Windows and Microsoft office, how to touch type, the meaning of computer terminology, and what the functionalities are of basic computer parts (eg, "CPU is the brain of the computer"). And later on we started learning how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.

I'm always surprised when I hear that other people don't have that sort of in depth tech learning in their schools, and worse so, that some people don't even have computer class. It just always felt like what we learned in computer class was an essential skill

Nope. We shed a lot of mentor-types in the great layoffs after Y2K, and a generation of nerds ran without any oral history and then taught that to their successors.

What they don't know they don't know is not only What best-practice is, but Why best-practice is. And there's little demonstrated effort to adhere.

I look over installation docs that do Very, VERY bad things, for instance. Build processes with no artifact validation, a toxic cargo chain, builds in prod, and so much more.

I can't blame the devs, as they didn't learn better. I blame the c-suites who canned the pricy experienced nerds who were also raising their successors properly.

Now we get to re-learn all that at great pain and hope to regain some of what we had before the next board of defectors guts another carefully-rebuilt culture of adequacy.

The difference is that you can use new parts in computers from 2010s. You can also replace them easily without much difficulty, as the standards haven't really changed that much.

But computers from the 80s and 90s are not compatible with modern platforms. Standards have changed, and new hardware thar uses standards like 32-bit PCI, ISA, MCA (for expansion cards), IDE are no longer manufactured. Even the CPU architecture had big changes between early x86 CPUs.