Older people can sometimes be interested in how the world has changed over their own lifetimes. I was born as WWII was starting and that is a while back. When I began graduate school after teaching 5th grade for 4 years, computers were a new thing. After I got my doctorate, I got a job as an assistant professor in the UWSP School of Education. We moved to a smaller town far from people we knew. I had used the computer language Fortran in writing my dissertation
https://sites.google.com/view/kirbyvariety1/dissertation-blog-issue-of-toward-the-light-links
There was one older professor who had a somewhat similar pattern to his work but I was basically alone. I wrote in the campus faculty newsletter that if anyone in any department wanted to talk about computers, I was interested. That note morphed into the side job of looking after and promoting the IBM 1600 that was being rented for faculty use. I was to inform and encourage faculty who might find the computer a useful tool for their research or teaching.
Sometimes, a faculty member would ask "What is a computer?" People today would probably not ask that question. You may be aware of "being connected", "being online" and other expressions that refer to use of the Internet. When I go to a campus weight room, it is often the case that every person I see, dozens of students, is using a smartphone or has a smartphone open and on, beside them. The internet, computers connected to each other, is a current BIG TOPIC. An emerging one is "AI", artificial intelligence.
I found this article from Pew Research quite interesting:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/05/8-charts-on-technology-use-around-the-world/
