You're conflating a few different types of computer literacy. Introductory programming, especially nowadays, doesn't have much to do with knowing whether the monitor is the computer or how to transfer files over a network. Certainly if you're programming for math or science you might not need those 'general computer skills.'
I'm deliberating lumping basic hardware and software literacy together. Everybody should understand the relationship between secondary storage, ram and the CPU. Everybody should understand that a computer program takes pieces of data in RAM and manipulates them using the CPU and has to make a special effort to get them to and from secondary storage or from a network connection and every should be able to basically understand how a program is, at some level of abstraction, a set of instructions for the computer to follow. They don't have to necessarily have particular operational skills - transference files on a particular networked system for example - but the basic knowledge of what is going on should be there.
Just to clarify, are your referring to a specific group of people as "everyone" or do you actually feel that every human being should know these things? If the latter, what purpose does knowing what RAM, storage and the CPU have for anyone who merely uses a computer to email and "google"?
Yes, I feel that everyone should learn these things. Why not? It's like two weeks of work at most to understand basically what is going on in hardware. I'm pretty sure they teach these things in high school or even grade school these days. I'm not suggesting knowing low level details, but understanding the basics of computation - here is this big universe of data out there in secondary storage but I need to grab a part of it into short term memory, do something with it and then stuff it back. It turns out that computation is a fundamental part of our universe (wolfram's a new kind of science and other works talk about this) and there's a lot to be gained by understanding what data is, the different ways it can live and how it is manipulated in modern computers. The CPU/RAM/storage cycle is fundamental and understanding this informs a lot of things. It's also pretty key to learning introductory programming, which I believe impacts basic thought processes in the same way that knowing basic math does.
