5 ms·

The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive c

The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other stuff I have no clue about. Nothing has changed. It’s just a matter of your point of view.

tpmx 7y ago
The abstraction layers they are (typically) comfortable with have shifted 1 or 2 levels up.
- choward 7y ago
  Those level ups are pretty bad though. They take you from owning your data and devices to third parties having complete control.
  - dnpp123 7y ago
    Because we (as a society) failed to make those layers compatible with privacy and data ownership ?
    - asdff 7y ago
      Apple deserves a lot of blame imo. They could have shipped the iPhone with terminal and root access and opened the floodgates on some very unique ideas with the new technology, but instead forced the hacking community to be this kind of unsupported/illicit grey area that shrunk every time a jailbreak was patched.
vidanay 7y ago
I'd rather be like my kid and worry about making sure his Fortnite is updated than playing the HIMEM.sys jigsaw puzzle that I had to.
- simcop2387 7y ago
  I've only got 16MB of ram, Warcraft needs at least 8MB of Extended ram but Quake needs at least 12 MB of Expanded ram. Damn I'm gonna need a boot floppy for one of them.
  - vidanay 7y ago
    If you were dealing in MB, you were already more advanced.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
madengr 7y ago
Well when I was a kid, I had to program my own games on the C64. Walked uphill to school both ways, too.
- vidanay 7y ago
  Typing 4000 hex values printed in 6 point font from Byte magazine.
  - tfigment 7y ago
    Mine were all printouts from the library from microfiche. I remember a stock trading simulator, a lemonade stand game and 3D sine wave program that was mostly in machine code.
benibela 7y ago
Literally hacking. Lots of shareware games wanted a registration code, but after changing the right offsets in the hex editor you could play them without registration code... People have no clue about computers, till they can manually convert between assembly and hex code
- na85 7y ago
  Actually, real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
  - red2awn 7y ago
    I thought they use butterflies.
    - lbruder 7y ago
      There's an Emacs macro for that.
    - kyuudou 7y ago
      I actually got these somewhat obscure references immediately: https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/ still very funny
ketzu 7y ago
I feel like people on here overestimate the tech literacy their peers learned when they were kids. While the computer-interested group around me did some experimentation, a little bit of programming and the like, most people I knew didn't do any of that. Most things just worked: Put the floppy inside, click on the correct icon [1], maybe type in one thing or click on the file with the correct ending/name that sounded like the game, and your game was running. I did not know what I was doing, just remembering what I was shown. Later as a teenager, I was asked to help out by other teens much more than my mother asked me to help. [1]: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-hEMIuqfC17M/VRbHvgeiw_I/AAAAAAAAAVU/v5ZrrLPAE-8/w640-h480-no/pareja.jpg https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-hEMIuqfC17M/VRbHvgeiw_I/A...
- cm2187 7y ago
  In the 90s, people had the excuse of not having the internet. As a kid in the 90s, I sort of knew I wanted to do more advanced stuff with my computer. I saw some ads in a computer magazine about a software to write software. So I bugged my mum into buying me Code Warrior for MacOS. I found myself in front of a white text editor, no indication of what to do next, no one around me who knew anything about programming, I had not even heard of C++. As I result I didn’t get into programming before university. Kids today have way less excuses. Between easier languages and libraries, better tools, way more resources available at their fingertips, much higher concentration of people knowledgeable around them, way more fun things they can do with computers, and a generally accepted idea that being good with computers is a good thing career wise (in the 90s it was often seen by parents as merely a sophisticated game console).

tpmx 7y ago

The abstraction layers they are (typically) comfortable with have shifted 1 or 2 levels up.

choward 7y ago
Those level ups are pretty bad though. They take you from owning your data and devices to third parties having complete control.
- dnpp123 7y ago
  Because we (as a society) failed to make those layers compatible with privacy and data ownership ?
  - asdff 7y ago
    Apple deserves a lot of blame imo. They could have shipped the iPhone with terminal and root access and opened the floodgates on some very unique ideas with the new technology, but instead forced the hacking community to be this kind of unsupported/illicit grey area that shrunk every time a jailbreak was patched.

vidanay 7y ago

I'd rather be like my kid and worry about making sure his Fortnite is updated than playing the HIMEM.sys jigsaw puzzle that I had to.

simcop2387 7y ago
I've only got 16MB of ram, Warcraft needs at least 8MB of Extended ram but Quake needs at least 12 MB of Expanded ram. Damn I'm gonna need a boot floppy for one of them.
- vidanay 7y ago
  If you were dealing in MB, you were already more advanced.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

madengr 7y ago

Well when I was a kid, I had to program my own games on the C64. Walked uphill to school both ways, too.

vidanay 7y ago
Typing 4000 hex values printed in 6 point font from Byte magazine.
- tfigment 7y ago
  Mine were all printouts from the library from microfiche. I remember a stock trading simulator, a lemonade stand game and 3D sine wave program that was mostly in machine code.

benibela 7y ago

Literally hacking. Lots of shareware games wanted a registration code, but after changing the right offsets in the hex editor you could play them without registration code... People have no clue about computers, till they can manually convert between assembly and hex code

na85 7y ago
Actually, real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
- red2awn 7y ago
  I thought they use butterflies.
  - lbruder 7y ago
    There's an Emacs macro for that.
  - kyuudou 7y ago
    I actually got these somewhat obscure references immediately: https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/ still very funny

ketzu 7y ago

I feel like people on here overestimate the tech literacy their peers learned when they were kids. While the computer-interested group around me did some experimentation, a little bit of programming and the like, most people I knew didn't do any of that. Most things just worked: Put the floppy inside, click on the correct icon [1], maybe type in one thing or click on the file with the correct ending/name that sounded like the game, and your game was running. I did not know what I was doing, just remembering what I was shown. Later as a teenager, I was asked to help out by other teens much more than my mother asked me to help. [1]: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-hEMIuqfC17M/VRbHvgeiw_I/AAAAAAAAAVU/v5ZrrLPAE-8/w640-h480-no/pareja.jpg https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-hEMIuqfC17M/VRbHvgeiw_I/A...

cm2187 7y ago
In the 90s, people had the excuse of not having the internet. As a kid in the 90s, I sort of knew I wanted to do more advanced stuff with my computer. I saw some ads in a computer magazine about a software to write software. So I bugged my mum into buying me Code Warrior for MacOS. I found myself in front of a white text editor, no indication of what to do next, no one around me who knew anything about programming, I had not even heard of C++. As I result I didn’t get into programming before university. Kids today have way less excuses. Between easier languages and libraries, better tools, way more resources available at their fingertips, much higher concentration of people knowledgeable around them, way more fun things they can do with computers, and a generally accepted idea that being good with computers is a good thing career wise (in the 90s it was often seen by parents as merely a sophisticated game console).