My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
Yeah of course. I mean concepts as simple as a file structure. That’s a big one that a lot of kids today don’t understand. The idea of a hierarchy of folders to store files is alien. You can read more about it here
From there I would say that if you understand that your browser communicates with specific servers to request and receive web pages and content you’d be ahead of curve. For most people “you need Wi-Fi to use chrome” is an adequate explanation.
If you ask me, a lot of this core understanding is missing for younger generations because computers have become too intuitive for the user to need to understand what’s going on underneath. ~20 years ago, back in the Windows XP days computers were fairly ubiquitous but UX was only starting to mature into what it is today. So you needed to learn if you wanted to do anything beyond open a program from the start menu.
I’ll say that I’m speaking from personal experience and the experience of people around me, if yours are different to mine that’s cool 😃
