6 ms·

Whenever I read things like this I grow sad that this generation threw out all their computers and traded them in for smartphones, which aren’t really computing

Whenever I read things like this I grow sad that this generation threw out all their computers and traded them in for smartphones, which aren’t really computing at all in my opinion. They are more like watching tv, something we already did too much of.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Annual Apple Mac sales are about the same as the whole of their Apple II production.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
There are two types of computing today (2019) - producing and consuming. I can't cite the correct reference, but it's something along the lines that when the masses do more of one thing than the other, something will suffer bad.
Kaveren 8y ago
You know this already, but smartphones are just computers that are small and portable. That's the only difference. Many of the operating systems are similar or based on those you'd use on a desktop or laptop computer. There's a large amount of software available on both mobile and traditional computer operating systems. TV is non-interactive, smartphones allow a great deal of interactivity. Besides, I don't think watching a fair amount of TV is a bad thing in the first place. It's a creative medium, you're consuming art (okay, maybe a lot of it isn't very good, but it's art nonetheless). I think you might just be nostalgic.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  Smartphones aren't nearly as good for being productive as desktops and laptops, though they're pretty good at consuming content. I think this shift away from desktops and laptops indicates a shift away from productivity. Yes, a lot of people watched too much TV, but at least they had the capability of doing things like image editing, building spreadsheets, etc. Smartphones can do those things, but it's so awkward that it's more likely that you're not going to bother, so you're more likely to just consume content instead of create it if you don't own a desktop or a laptop. Personally, I'm not really nostalgic over traditional computers, but I am a little nostalgic for stuff created by hand instead of filled in with a template.
  - bluntfang 8y ago
    >productive That's an interesting word choice and something tells me "productivity" is highly subjective. For example, can you code on a smartphone? Yeah, but not as productively as on a desktop. Can I manage my sales team's day to day from my smart phone? Absolutely and that might be a great choice as managing sales probably doesn't lend to being in one place for very long.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Smartphone no, but I’ve written thousands of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of words of material on an iPad, because it’s what I have with me on the train. Context is everything. I have written a few small programs on my phone too. Google Docs makes writing seamless with the desktop, and I can ftp my code out of Pythonista. Probably not a typical setup, but I find it very productive. They’re just tools.
  - meuk 8y ago
    This. If we'd have a smartphone with a proper USB connection (one that doesn't stop working after a few years), and the possibility to connect it to a keyboard, screen, and mouse, I'd do pretty much everything on my phone. Instead, I can't even browser normally: I get a dumbed down version of most sites.
    - windows_tips 8y ago
      It's possible to 'dock' a phone with a keyboard, monitor, and mouse. I'm not sure many easily support that setup though.
- scandox 8y ago
  A keyboard connected to nothing is a more creative device than a smart phone.
  - 14 8y ago
    I agree. To me a computer is a machine under a persons control and I believe if you own something you should have full control. This is why we have a jailbreak scene. People want control.
  - thenanyu 8y ago
    Can a keyboard shoot video, take a photo, record a podcast? Definition of “creative” seems narrow here.
- simonh 8y ago
  I’m reading this thread and replying from my phone while on the bus. Try that with a desktop or even a laptop. I consume a huge amount of educational and special interest material from YouTube that wouldn’t exist let alone be accessible in the age of TV. Mobile devices do have some negative consequences, sure, but they also enable engagement, contribution, self improvement and creativity. My kids watch a lot of YouTube, but also use their iPads to do homework and sketch and draw. These are fantastic tools. How we use them is up to us.
pjmlp 8y ago
Using Swift Playgrounds, Pythonista, Continuous and similar apps is not much different than booting up my Timex 2068 and coding away in the realm of Timex Basic.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  No - for two reasons. The first is that those old systems were so limited you could either write BASIC or machine code. There were no distractions, no other apps, and no social media - except paper magazines. So 100% of your computer time was devoted to typing in code, learning about code, or writing your own code. The other reason is that in the UK at least, a lot of one-man-shops produced an entire games industry around the Sinclair (Timex) Z81, Spectrum, and other 8-bits of the day. The business had all of the magic characteristics of an open market: minimal cost of entry, minimal cost of marketing (through cheap ads in paper magazines), low-cost distribution, and an enthusiastic and largely untapped potential customer base. No platform today has those characteristics. Web "apps" probably come closest, which is why we're talking about this on HN. But a lot of 8-bit businesses and careers were started without the corporate and financial cruft that surrounds modern start-ups.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    The large majority of those UK professional shops were using 16 bit machines for coding those 8 bit games, while deploying them over connection cables. Coding on the machines themselves was more of an indie kind of thing. Plenty of stories about it on the Retro Gaming Magazine. Most of my friends back on the 8 bit days never learned to code anything beyond LOAD "", as they had plenty of games to choose from at the local bootleg shop.
  - jfoutz 8y ago
    Also, you had to memorize everything. No search. You either knew the solution or you spent a lot of time looking at manuals.
pmorici 8y ago
This generation didn't throw out their equivalent to the TI home computer. The same kind of people who were inclined to buy a TI in '83 are buying the RaspberryPi today. More computers are sold today to a wider variety of people that were ever sold in 1983.
- gbin 8y ago
  The big difference is that in 1980s, we had no choice. If I wanted to play games I had to learn how to use this new TI99/4A. Back to those cartridges were in limited number and my time was kind of infinite (it seemed looking back ;) ). So I started to borrow books and copy listings, then started to understand basic and finally tried to adapt the gameplay etc... I see my kid today, he is absolutely hooked to videogames. Minecraft and Fornite, they are already richer in variety than all of the games of my childhood combined! He does some stuff on scratch and loves it so I tried python with the super simple 2d game engines... This has been a repeated failure. He has 0 patience left to try out stuff, learn the syntax or tinker with it. But I understand, it is really easy to get instant satisfaction from the baked in stuff, oh look a new challenge to do on fornite!
  - ido 8y ago
    I don't buy it - your kid may just not be into programming as much as you were. I was born in '83 and in the 90s (when I got into computers) QBasic was already well buried in some obscure directory inside DOS (or later the windows 95 installation CD) & with all the piracy there was no shortage of games around. I still got into programming as a kid & have been doing it for a living since I was 18. And I had plenty of friends (most!) who just wanted to play the games, as well as those that got into programming to make their own.
    - dorkwood 8y ago
      Did someone give you a book, or something? I’m curious about people who learned to program as children. I was an intensely curious kid too, and would quite happily dig around the Windows 3.1 OS hoping to uncover something cool. All I really got out of it was a knowledge of the computer’s file system, though. In my early teens I had access to the internet, and managed to find a C++ tutorial online. I learned to print text to the command line, but not much more than that. It took until my late 20s that I finally had the resources and mental stamina to start learning it for real.
fit2rule 8y ago
Removing the expectation that a computer would ship with a compiler onboard, ready for use, was a big mistake. We lost so much control over our devices when we passively allowed the computer companies to take that power from our devices ..
- whyenot 8y ago
  The TI-99/4A didn't ship with a compiler. Neither did the Atari 400 or 800, the Commodore VIC-20 & 64, or for that matter, the Apple II. Sure, the Apple came with a BASIC interpreter, as did several of the others, but not a compiler and you could usually purchase an assembler. This isn't something we "lost," it's something we didn't have.
  - nosecrets 8y ago
    There was a very expensive compiler for the Apple ][. Apple Pascal, based on UCSD Pascal, had its own operating system, released in 1979. I ran into it in 1983 in my very first computer class (8th grade). https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#01 https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#01
    - walshemj 8y ago
      I recall supporting our companies scientific software on apple ]['s that used UCSD - don't suppose any on remembers "Tec Pack" I had to recompile the programs to hard code the security dongles key into it.
  - fit2rule 8y ago
    Yes, those things did come with the means onboard by which software could be created. It wasn't a compiler, if you want to be pedantic about it, but no computer shipped in the 80's ever survived unless it had the means onboard to support development of software for it. BASIC was a very effective means by which to write software in those days... We do not have that capability with the iDevices. Nor do we really have it with workstation devices (except of course Linux). Manufacturers don't consider it important to breed a generation of users who can be developers with little more than the initial shipment of software - instead the base has been split, such that more profit can be gained, and more control over an elite market, can be applied. Developers are the tip of the spear for OS vendors. There is a great deal of control over this end of things, for no reason other than to make it possible to have a separated distinction between developer and user. I believe this distinction is having a net deleterious effect on computing ..
ido 8y ago
"this generation" is buying a lot more computers (the traditional pc/mac kind) than their 1983 equivalents, even accounting for the greater world population today.
andybp85 8y ago
I borderline take offense to this lol. I first got interested in computers and eventually programming by playing with custom ROMs for my Windows Mobile phone when I was in college, circa 2006. If it wasn't for smartphones, I never would have taken a networking class (I was a radio/TV major) and realized I was very interested in what I could make a computer do (I'm a software engineer now). I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  I got interested in computers because I wanted something to play games on, that's all I cared about... and my cousin wisely told my parents to get me an Amiga 500 instead of what I wanted. It came with a lot of manuals which I devoured, and though I didn't program much on the Amiga, I owe a lot to all that (most importantly a point of comparison -- it's not like I haven't experienced all the stuff that came later, and I know I missed out on an even more "empowered" time in the 80s, I barely just catched the tail end of a golden age). https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals Glorious. Sure, most kids who had an Amiga didn't get that deeply into it, e.g. a friend of mine who also had an Amiga never seems to use his computer for much more than playing games and watching movies to this day. But for anyone interested to dive deeper, the doors were wide open and and as encouraging and honest to newbies as humanly possible. Even my non-technical kid friends knew how to load up a neat module in protracker. None of that focus on quality and openness for the sake of quality and doing the right thing was to the detriment of the "casuals", and a polar opposite of a world of stuff like miniminzed JS that does nothing interesting, smartphone apps that half-ass what a website could do, games that just rehash and dumb down the same shit to keep people consuming. The shift from tools and variety to mere consuming and fads is rather crass, come to think about it.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  > "I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past." True. But most people never took the TV to the toilet with them. Yes, It's the same type of person. But today there's no norms to discourage usage (e.g., most people didn't watch TV at work) and thus ever less self-regulation. Note: I'm not longing for the good ol' days. Just wanting to add some clarity to the comparison.
tyingq 8y ago
I don't think it's really that different. I only knew a few other kids in the 80's that had a PC. It seems similar with my kids. They are among a few in their school that have an interest in things like Rpi, Arduino, ESP8266, etc.
jackhack 8y ago
It's the difference between consuming and creating. Smartphones are for consumers of information. Computers are (were?) for creation of information.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

Annual Apple Mac sales are about the same as the whole of their Apple II production.

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

There are two types of computing today (2019) - producing and consuming. I can't cite the correct reference, but it's something along the lines that when the masses do more of one thing than the other, something will suffer bad.

Kaveren 8y ago

You know this already, but smartphones are just computers that are small and portable. That's the only difference. Many of the operating systems are similar or based on those you'd use on a desktop or laptop computer. There's a large amount of software available on both mobile and traditional computer operating systems. TV is non-interactive, smartphones allow a great deal of interactivity. Besides, I don't think watching a fair amount of TV is a bad thing in the first place. It's a creative medium, you're consuming art (okay, maybe a lot of it isn't very good, but it's art nonetheless). I think you might just be nostalgic.

beatgammit 8y ago
Smartphones aren't nearly as good for being productive as desktops and laptops, though they're pretty good at consuming content. I think this shift away from desktops and laptops indicates a shift away from productivity. Yes, a lot of people watched too much TV, but at least they had the capability of doing things like image editing, building spreadsheets, etc. Smartphones can do those things, but it's so awkward that it's more likely that you're not going to bother, so you're more likely to just consume content instead of create it if you don't own a desktop or a laptop. Personally, I'm not really nostalgic over traditional computers, but I am a little nostalgic for stuff created by hand instead of filled in with a template.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  >productive That's an interesting word choice and something tells me "productivity" is highly subjective. For example, can you code on a smartphone? Yeah, but not as productively as on a desktop. Can I manage my sales team's day to day from my smart phone? Absolutely and that might be a great choice as managing sales probably doesn't lend to being in one place for very long.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Smartphone no, but I’ve written thousands of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of words of material on an iPad, because it’s what I have with me on the train. Context is everything. I have written a few small programs on my phone too. Google Docs makes writing seamless with the desktop, and I can ftp my code out of Pythonista. Probably not a typical setup, but I find it very productive. They’re just tools.
- meuk 8y ago
  This. If we'd have a smartphone with a proper USB connection (one that doesn't stop working after a few years), and the possibility to connect it to a keyboard, screen, and mouse, I'd do pretty much everything on my phone. Instead, I can't even browser normally: I get a dumbed down version of most sites.
  - windows_tips 8y ago
    It's possible to 'dock' a phone with a keyboard, monitor, and mouse. I'm not sure many easily support that setup though.
scandox 8y ago
A keyboard connected to nothing is a more creative device than a smart phone.
- 14 8y ago
  I agree. To me a computer is a machine under a persons control and I believe if you own something you should have full control. This is why we have a jailbreak scene. People want control.
- thenanyu 8y ago
  Can a keyboard shoot video, take a photo, record a podcast? Definition of “creative” seems narrow here.
simonh 8y ago
I’m reading this thread and replying from my phone while on the bus. Try that with a desktop or even a laptop. I consume a huge amount of educational and special interest material from YouTube that wouldn’t exist let alone be accessible in the age of TV. Mobile devices do have some negative consequences, sure, but they also enable engagement, contribution, self improvement and creativity. My kids watch a lot of YouTube, but also use their iPads to do homework and sketch and draw. These are fantastic tools. How we use them is up to us.

pjmlp 8y ago

Using Swift Playgrounds, Pythonista, Continuous and similar apps is not much different than booting up my Timex 2068 and coding away in the realm of Timex Basic.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
No - for two reasons. The first is that those old systems were so limited you could either write BASIC or machine code. There were no distractions, no other apps, and no social media - except paper magazines. So 100% of your computer time was devoted to typing in code, learning about code, or writing your own code. The other reason is that in the UK at least, a lot of one-man-shops produced an entire games industry around the Sinclair (Timex) Z81, Spectrum, and other 8-bits of the day. The business had all of the magic characteristics of an open market: minimal cost of entry, minimal cost of marketing (through cheap ads in paper magazines), low-cost distribution, and an enthusiastic and largely untapped potential customer base. No platform today has those characteristics. Web "apps" probably come closest, which is why we're talking about this on HN. But a lot of 8-bit businesses and careers were started without the corporate and financial cruft that surrounds modern start-ups.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  The large majority of those UK professional shops were using 16 bit machines for coding those 8 bit games, while deploying them over connection cables. Coding on the machines themselves was more of an indie kind of thing. Plenty of stories about it on the Retro Gaming Magazine. Most of my friends back on the 8 bit days never learned to code anything beyond LOAD "", as they had plenty of games to choose from at the local bootleg shop.
- jfoutz 8y ago
  Also, you had to memorize everything. No search. You either knew the solution or you spent a lot of time looking at manuals.

pmorici 8y ago

This generation didn't throw out their equivalent to the TI home computer. The same kind of people who were inclined to buy a TI in '83 are buying the RaspberryPi today. More computers are sold today to a wider variety of people that were ever sold in 1983.

gbin 8y ago
The big difference is that in 1980s, we had no choice. If I wanted to play games I had to learn how to use this new TI99/4A. Back to those cartridges were in limited number and my time was kind of infinite (it seemed looking back ;) ). So I started to borrow books and copy listings, then started to understand basic and finally tried to adapt the gameplay etc... I see my kid today, he is absolutely hooked to videogames. Minecraft and Fornite, they are already richer in variety than all of the games of my childhood combined! He does some stuff on scratch and loves it so I tried python with the super simple 2d game engines... This has been a repeated failure. He has 0 patience left to try out stuff, learn the syntax or tinker with it. But I understand, it is really easy to get instant satisfaction from the baked in stuff, oh look a new challenge to do on fornite!
- ido 8y ago
  I don't buy it - your kid may just not be into programming as much as you were. I was born in '83 and in the 90s (when I got into computers) QBasic was already well buried in some obscure directory inside DOS (or later the windows 95 installation CD) & with all the piracy there was no shortage of games around. I still got into programming as a kid & have been doing it for a living since I was 18. And I had plenty of friends (most!) who just wanted to play the games, as well as those that got into programming to make their own.
  - dorkwood 8y ago
    Did someone give you a book, or something? I’m curious about people who learned to program as children. I was an intensely curious kid too, and would quite happily dig around the Windows 3.1 OS hoping to uncover something cool. All I really got out of it was a knowledge of the computer’s file system, though. In my early teens I had access to the internet, and managed to find a C++ tutorial online. I learned to print text to the command line, but not much more than that. It took until my late 20s that I finally had the resources and mental stamina to start learning it for real.

fit2rule 8y ago

Removing the expectation that a computer would ship with a compiler onboard, ready for use, was a big mistake. We lost so much control over our devices when we passively allowed the computer companies to take that power from our devices ..

whyenot 8y ago
The TI-99/4A didn't ship with a compiler. Neither did the Atari 400 or 800, the Commodore VIC-20 & 64, or for that matter, the Apple II. Sure, the Apple came with a BASIC interpreter, as did several of the others, but not a compiler and you could usually purchase an assembler. This isn't something we "lost," it's something we didn't have.
- nosecrets 8y ago
  There was a very expensive compiler for the Apple ][. Apple Pascal, based on UCSD Pascal, had its own operating system, released in 1979. I ran into it in 1983 in my very first computer class (8th grade). https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#01 https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#01
  - walshemj 8y ago
    I recall supporting our companies scientific software on apple ]['s that used UCSD - don't suppose any on remembers "Tec Pack" I had to recompile the programs to hard code the security dongles key into it.
- fit2rule 8y ago
  Yes, those things did come with the means onboard by which software could be created. It wasn't a compiler, if you want to be pedantic about it, but no computer shipped in the 80's ever survived unless it had the means onboard to support development of software for it. BASIC was a very effective means by which to write software in those days... We do not have that capability with the iDevices. Nor do we really have it with workstation devices (except of course Linux). Manufacturers don't consider it important to breed a generation of users who can be developers with little more than the initial shipment of software - instead the base has been split, such that more profit can be gained, and more control over an elite market, can be applied. Developers are the tip of the spear for OS vendors. There is a great deal of control over this end of things, for no reason other than to make it possible to have a separated distinction between developer and user. I believe this distinction is having a net deleterious effect on computing ..

ido 8y ago

"this generation" is buying a lot more computers (the traditional pc/mac kind) than their 1983 equivalents, even accounting for the greater world population today.

andybp85 8y ago

I borderline take offense to this lol. I first got interested in computers and eventually programming by playing with custom ROMs for my Windows Mobile phone when I was in college, circa 2006. If it wasn't for smartphones, I never would have taken a networking class (I was a radio/TV major) and realized I was very interested in what I could make a computer do (I'm a software engineer now). I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
I got interested in computers because I wanted something to play games on, that's all I cared about... and my cousin wisely told my parents to get me an Amiga 500 instead of what I wanted. It came with a lot of manuals which I devoured, and though I didn't program much on the Amiga, I owe a lot to all that (most importantly a point of comparison -- it's not like I haven't experienced all the stuff that came later, and I know I missed out on an even more "empowered" time in the 80s, I barely just catched the tail end of a golden age). https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals Glorious. Sure, most kids who had an Amiga didn't get that deeply into it, e.g. a friend of mine who also had an Amiga never seems to use his computer for much more than playing games and watching movies to this day. But for anyone interested to dive deeper, the doors were wide open and and as encouraging and honest to newbies as humanly possible. Even my non-technical kid friends knew how to load up a neat module in protracker. None of that focus on quality and openness for the sake of quality and doing the right thing was to the detriment of the "casuals", and a polar opposite of a world of stuff like miniminzed JS that does nothing interesting, smartphone apps that half-ass what a website could do, games that just rehash and dumb down the same shit to keep people consuming. The shift from tools and variety to mere consuming and fads is rather crass, come to think about it.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
> "I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past." True. But most people never took the TV to the toilet with them. Yes, It's the same type of person. But today there's no norms to discourage usage (e.g., most people didn't watch TV at work) and thus ever less self-regulation. Note: I'm not longing for the good ol' days. Just wanting to add some clarity to the comparison.

tyingq 8y ago

I don't think it's really that different. I only knew a few other kids in the 80's that had a PC. It seems similar with my kids. They are among a few in their school that have an interest in things like Rpi, Arduino, ESP8266, etc.

jackhack 8y ago

It's the difference between consuming and creating. Smartphones are for consumers of information. Computers are (were?) for creation of information.