4 ms·
It might be harder to tinker with The Device, but tinkering kids these days are not bereft of options. When I was a teenager I remember badly wanting a "386 sin
by c22 8y ago
It might be harder to tinker with The Device, but tinkering kids these days are not bereft of options. When I was a teenager I remember badly wanting a "386 single board computer" which I saw advertised in the pages of Popular Science for hundreds of dollars. Imagine the things I could do with a whole computer small enough to hold in one hand! It could breathe new life into my projects and bring my tinkering to a whole new level! Sadly this marvel was beyond my budget at the time but today you can buy dozens of such boards for a fraction of the price. Boards with a dizzying array of integrated peripherals teenage me wouldn't have even known what to do with. Today there are uncountable open source projects you can download immediately to run on these boards, whole sophisticated stacks which can be imported now and torn apart to be stitched back together tomorrow. A tech-interested teen today can buy devices with their pocket change that have more power and flexibility than any of the platforms I had access to as a kid.
- ghaff 8y agoIt may be worth observing that the window when teenagers and younger were messing around with config.sys files and routinely building DOS computers from parts was actually pretty narrow. I'm a bit older and didn't touch a computer keyboard (actually a teletype) until late in high school and didn't even do much with computers in college. (I'm an engineer by training but not CS.) I was working when I got into PCs, initially as a way to do some engineering calculations and project tracking on my job. I agree that although consumption is the norm, the options and information available for those who want to go under the hood is pretty amazing today.