Defaults

A social aspect of operating systems is that they control the "default" experience people have with computers.

Installing an operating system is prohibitvely difficult, so computer manufacturers install one before selling a device. When they choose Windows and Windows comes with Internet Explorer built in, people use Internet Explorer.¹

There are a lot of kinda grim things that follow from this, and you should dig deeper, but I bring it up to mention the 1980s.

The personal computers available then, like the Commodore 64, only had text based interfaces. In many practical ways, people were closer to the world of programming.²

So think about that whenever you feel like you have a lot left to learn. A lot of what you do and do not know about computers was dictated for you by the fact that you grew up interacting with them on a touch screen instead of on a terminal. Things are not as intimiating as they seem.