> Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe. The first computers I used (Amigas) ran off floppy disks. Whenever we bought new

> Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe. The first computers I used (Amigas) ran off floppy disks. Whenever we bought new software, we'd use copies of the disks and keep the originals stored away. This had the effect of making everything safe; even accidentally formatting an OS disk was no problem, since it was just a copy and most things didn't need it to boot anyway. When I was about 8 we got a hard drive, which made life much more convenient (e.g. the ability to install games, rather than swapping floppies around, easily finding saved data compared to trawling through umpteen disk boxes, etc.) but also introduced some danger: changes (including mistakes) would persist across reboots, the HD didn't just contain copies of stuff (we, like most people, didn't have backups), and the impact of something like data loss was expanded to include everything we have (including other people's stuff), rather than just the particular floppies in the drives. I imagine those introduced to computers between, say, the mid 90s to ~2010, would be under more pressure to be conservative, as their mistakes might have a real impact on things like their parent's budgeting spreadsheets, etc. Also, a bit tangentially, I feel that Windows and Linux present more opportunities for mistakes compared to AmigaOS: they spread important files around various parts of the filesystem, and there's a quite tight coupling between the OS and third-party applications. My Amiga HDs all have a standalone Workbench partition for booting, an Applications partition with each program in its own drawer, etc. which limited the scope of any of my experimenting; I remember trying to set up Windows in a similar way, and find that whilst all installers give the option of installing to a user-chosen directory, many programs don't actually work if they're not in the default "C:\Program Files" :( This is where I think initiatives like the RaspberryPi really shine: they're inexpensive, standalone machines, so the impact of any mistakes is very low. Accidentally formatted the drive? Your parent's work documents are safely stored on a different machine. Whilst you can't get back to a clean slate by rebooting, at least SD cards are easy to pull out and make backups of.