Your comment makes me realize a problem with this article: It's not that it isn't true, it is too true. Its title is a tautology. Of course the technological wi

Your comment makes me realize a problem with this article: It's not that it isn't true, it is too true. Its title is a tautology. Of course the technological winner will always be a toy. To a proper hacker, every object is a potential toy. The very expensive multiphoton microscopes that I once worked with were, and still are, very serious medical research tools. But they were also wonderful toys. Building them was fun. For an R&D engineer, engineering is fun. Which were the "serious" computers again? The ones that were never used for fun? But that excludes all of them. Sometimes the fun was right out in the open: The DEC PDP-1 of 1959, for example, became famous as a game machine, because Spacewar was written on it. But I'll bet that even old-school bank-account data processing was a lot of fun when it was first being invented. I bet even COBOL programmers had fun, especially in 1960 when COBOL was brand new.