> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.
I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.
Today I explained to a sales engineer working at a Fortune 500 company how to open an Incognito window in Google Chrome.
Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being less capable of identifying common file formats. Computer illiteracy has been snowballing ever since.
It didn't take deep technical skill and knowledge to build a Geocities website in the 1990s though, and most people who did were minimally computer literate. I feel like you're conflating issues here.
I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.