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This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing

This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other day. Nowadays most people I see of that age group are happy with a YouTube video on their smartphones. General purpose of computers is simply not visible. Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years from so far in India. We have too many tall-walled gardens now. Update: I should add I am happy with how powerful computers are these days, but they are not for the purpose of learning or tinkering the actual device or its software. It is just way to consume media for the mainstream.

fsflover 6y ago
> Nowadays most people I see of that age group are happy with a YouTube video on their smartphones. General purpose of computers is simply not visible. Have a look at GNU/Linux phones recently developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone
blowfish721 6y ago
From my perspective I think it might feel that way because back then it was mostly tech curious people who used the internet. Now it’s mainstream and everyone is connected which means most of the content is produced for massconsumation. Back when I got my first computer and got online, in around 1996 I think, the computers were still quite expensive and I would have killes to have access to the information and tinkerboards/cheap computers that are available today.
- harlanji 6y ago
  Maybe we could make an Internet for Age 35+ or so. Remember when one could take over Yahoo chats with Javascript? With containers and stuff, the Internet could be a lot of fun again. App battles in the park by old timers on the chess tables.
  - sneak 6y ago
    It's called the internet. The things you describe are still happening across a thousand IRC servers you've never been invited to.
- brainless 6y ago
  I clearly remember my friends' parents being scared of me since I used to open up PCs and see what components were in them. I have been using laptops that can not be easily opened/upgraded for the last 4-5 years. Devices are being made mainly for people to consume media and that's it. I think computers of the earlier era and now are not at all comparable. The devices now are not really "computers" as they used to be. They are opaque all-soldered-and-sealed boxes. How will you inspire anyone to tinker with them? Adding a graphics card to a box was such a cool thing for all of my gamer pals. Video cards, audio cards, or any upgrades would naturally involve casual talks about tech. Who does that these days, unless you own and upgrade a desktop?
  - exporectomy 6y ago
    I think you're comparing the wrong things. When I was a kid, I tinkered with clocks and watches. I thought digital ones were opaque boxes and remember calling them boring. The mechanical clocks were much more fun and reconfigurable. Does that mean we've sadly come to the end of the era of hobbyist friendly alarm clocks? Maybe, but so what? We then got computers instead. Now we have Raspberry Pi's for kids who see cellphones as boring black boxes. There's always something and it's fine if it's not the same thing it used to be. The same thing happened with cameras - people used to build their own cameras out of bits of wood and develop their own pictures from glass plates. but cheap film cameras eliminated that hobby from the mainstream. It's fine. Technology moves on. Now we have 3D printers that enable kids to make things they never could have before without access to an expensive milling machine.
  - auggierose 6y ago
    I never liked to tinker with hardware. Tinkering with software was more fun, and the hardware that I can run my self-made software on is now more powerful than ever. Even an iPad, or rather, especially an iPad.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
I hear people saying this a lot, and I admit I sometimes think it myself. But I'm not sure how true it is, as opposed to just a perception. > Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years I think therein lies the rub. Teenagers curious about computers aren't very common. And even back then (early 2000s), my experience in Europe was the same [0]. Most of the people in my school didn't really care about computers. They had other interests and pursuits. The difference today is that computers are much more widespread because they allow people to do much more diverse things. At the time, they would maybe type up a report or something and that's it. There wasn't Facebook et al., so many people didn't spend any significant amount of time in front of the computer. Idle time would mostly be spent in front of the TV or hanging out with friends. I think the reason this perception comes up is that at the time, people who "spent time on computers" were doing so out of curiosity and interest in learning about them. So the shortcut is that since now many more people are spending a good chunk of their day in front of the computer, that must mean they're as interested in them as the "curious teenagers" of our time. That's simply not true. Just look at what they do on the computer. It's mostly idle scrolling on some form of social media. And, to address the subject of the OP, I'm also wondering whether there's an actual decline in the "general-purposeness" of the computer, as opposed to there just being more "non general-purpose" computers. There's a definite decline in the percentage, and maybe even in absolute numbers if we look at people who used to use computers because they had no alternative but who are now better served by smartphones or tablets and also for uses which need "specialized processors" (say ML). I draw a parallel to my feeling whenever I see discussions about iOS being locked down and people expecting the whole of the HN crowd to be up in arms about it. In my case, I was one of those curious teenagers of yore. I still love tinkering with computers, etc. But phones? I just can't be bothered to care about them. Can I make calls and check some maps? It's great! I have an iPhone and treat it pretty much like a dishwasher. I barely have any apps installed. Neither allows me to install whatever random app I want. It's not an issue for my dishwasher, and frankly, nor is it for my iPhone. Whatever "general computing" I feel like doing, I prefer doing it on an actual computer. Of course, there are other philosophical considerations in this discussion which I understand and can get behind, but the point is that, to many people, a computer is an appliance. They want it to do certain things. Does it do that? Great! If it doesn't, it's not fit for purpose. They simply do not care if some guy some where would like to do some thing with it but can't because Microsot / Apple are locking it down. --- [0] I went to school in the suburbs of Paris, so many of the kids' parents were pretty well-off and many were even working in computer-related fields, so there wasn't any access problem. Practically all of them actually had at least one up-to-date computer at home.
javajosh 6y ago
Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce. A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for, which means "walled gardens", patents, DRM, license servers, anti-tampering mechanisms, and the like. In essence all content (music, movies, software, books, etc) follows the same pattern. Note that profit-driven entities can give away software, but only if it supports another artificially scarce good. Google rents space on its search tool, as Facebook rents space on its social media tool. Ad space is scarce, and made more valuable the more Google and Facebook give away (which is proportional to the attention they capture). But devs generally don't like artificial scarcity, so the platforms need a path in for them. I think Apple demonstrates this most clearly: the iPad and iPhone are software consumption devices, but the Mac is also a software creation device, and therefore is generally more open, free, and changeable.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  > Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce. A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for, which means "walled gardens", patents, DRM, license servers, anti-tampering mechanisms, and the like. In essence all content (music, movies, software, books, etc) follows the same pattern. You remind me of Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation" keynote, which interestingly didn't notice that streaming and similar cloud-based services would become the DRM of the last decade. Or, as it turns out, the rising appeal of non-general purpose devices that are more efficient. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg [1] https://joshuawise.com/28c3-transcript https://joshuawise.com/28c3-transcript
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  Linux is software, Linux is economically worth a lot, Linux isn't artificially scarce.
  - IQunder130 6y ago
    Control of where Linux development is going is indeed economically worth a lot. Copies of the Linux kernel are near enough to worthless for the distinction not to matter.
8draco8 6y ago
Classic PC and even some laptops especially with open operating systems are still fantastic tool for learning and tinkering. There's just more options now for people that simply wants to consume media without thinking too much about everything else. PC enthusiast scene is getting bigger every year.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Learn what? Installing Linux on a computer doesn't really teach you anything much at all about computers. It teaches you about Linux.
  - sriku 6y ago
    That's today, but it wasn't so initially. You'd learn about your monitor's scan modes, how the disk is structured, dumping bytes between devices, optimizing for load by placing bytes on the outer sectors of floppy disks, using RAM as a disk to speed things up, and whole lot of "useless" things that build machine sympathy.
    - 8draco8 6y ago
      Well you still have easier and more difficult distros. You can go easy route and play with Ubuntu or Fedora but you can approach linux from the hard side and try Arch or Gentoo
    - randcraw 6y ago
      Yes, but it's also true that drivers and peripherals are generally a lot more complicated today and hardware services more federated across layers of dependency and security than in the days of DOS or Windows 3. Reverse engineering today's Windows 10 wifi-based encrypted RAID disk array is a good deal trickier than a 30 year-old DOS FAT IDE drive ever was.
  - G3n0t 6y ago
    Non sense. Linux makes many details about computers much more explicit than Windows does. Even installing Ubuntu teaches you something about how computers boot, what partitions are and file systems do. Linux also makes it easy to get started in programming on the OS level -- thanks to the Internet it is way easier to find information about how everything works. So from a learning experience perspective, a kid tinkering with Linux might gain more insight into how computers work and than, say, on Windows or Mac.
jacquesm 6y ago
The mainstream was never going to be part of the tinkerers and hackers. But the depressing thing is to what extent todays hackers have become consumers. But, we've still got linux and a lot of hardware support for that. I'll likely be the last bastion of general purpose computing.
- rimliu 6y ago
  No, the depressing thing is how many people on HN want others to be just like them.
  - imbnwa 6y ago
    Which is why certain people question "culture fit" as an exhaustive reason for not hiring
watwut 6y ago
You cant compare back-then-yourself to general population now and assume the comparison is good comparison between generations. Plenty of your peers were not on those chat rooms. They did not interacted with tech like you or even did not interacted with tech at all. They had different hobbies and interests, different habits then you.
koonsolo 6y ago
Why the negative outlook? The world now is way more awesome for hackers than it was back then! 1. You can find any information you want, in an instant. 2. Hardware is very cheap, computers can be tiny, you can order components from anywhere 3. Robotics and electronics are way cooler now, with drones etc. 4. Software development is way more productive with all the libraries and tools we have right now. 5. When I was a kid, games were made by 1 or a few people. It quickly evolved into big studios. But nowadays, a solo or tiny team can release super successful games.
- kuschku 6y ago
  > 2. Hardware is very cheap, computers can be tiny, you can order components from anywhere In the past I could get any component I might need from a local store in 20 minutes. now I've got 2 weeks to 3 months turnaround on shipping from shenzhen.
  - krageon 6y ago
    I really miss hardware shops now that you pointed this out :(
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    In the past, there were only enough components to fill a few shelves. Also, you can get many, many components from local stores now, if you're willing to pay the 4x-10x premium. Not many people are, so local stores aren't as common.
    - kuschku 6y ago
      In 2010, the local store had more components than I can order at reichelt, and was cheaper than aliexpress (if you include shipping). I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need, and with enough technical expertise that you could show your circuit diagram and get feedback how to improve it. This is something only seen in shenzhen today. Now I just don't do any small projects anymore as there are no stores in the entire state left, and the extreme premium in shipping and waiting time of aliexpress just isn't worth it anymore.
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
The percentage of people who tinkered and explored, and did all the fun stuff back then is probably still the same as now. But back then most of the "normal" people didn't use the internet at all, and now use it for youtube and facebook.
cosmodisk 6y ago
I feel very similar. It took less than 2 decades to go from tinkers, creators,and just general curiosity, to somewhat mindless consumption of videos,or photos. When the Covid wave started last year, we had to assess who has necessary equipment at home to be able to work remotely. A lot of people don't even have a computer at home,all they need is a phone or a tablet, which are created for consumption,not to be creative with it.
visarga 6y ago
> Nowadays most people I see of that age group are happy with a YouTube video on their smartphones. YouTube is a fantastic resource for any hobby or subject. It's like a world wide university.
- smk_ 6y ago
  Except that the algorithm is optimized for revenue and attention-grabbing content (the opposite of university material), and will gradually steer watching habits in that direction.
yowlingcat 6y ago
The challenge with technology these days is that while the capabilities have gone in one direction, the culture has not necessarily gone in the direction many of us who came of age during an earlier era wish it might have. To some extent, I guess this is just a part of what happens when cutting edge things go mainstream -- no frontier lasts forever, sadly.
IgorPartola 6y ago
The difference is that those people who are happy with YouTube videos wouldn’t have been tinkering with computers in 2006. You have to remember that tinkering with computers was and still is a nerdy niche. Let’s say there are 1000 people in the world. Of those, 10 are hackers (in the “tinker with computers” sense, not on the malicious sense), 20 are enthusiasts, the rest are neither. In 1990, you’d have 15 people on the net talking about computers and doing stuff with them. Everyone else is watching TV, reading books, whatever. In 2006, you have 100 people: 10 hackers, 20 enthusiasts, 70 people who found cat videos. In 2021 you have 990 people on the net: same hackers abs enthusiasts but also a whole bunch of people who are here for the cat videos. Does that detract from what the 10 hackers are doing? I don’t think so. In fact, it adds opportunity to the hackers and enthusiasts. We didn’t lose the hacker spirit. Go look at hackaday.com to see what people are working on. We simply gained an audience.
- bigsuperlatives 6y ago
  Somehow related: > //i.ibb.co/3Sv29Qs/23340-en-REVIEW-FINAL-Mail.png ^^
- nightski 6y ago
  You are creating a false dichotomy of cat videos vs. hacker. I've watched a cat video or two. I've also spent the vast majority of my life programming (coming up on 40). My point is, video games were my gateway to programming. I got into mods and then expanded from there. I'm sure I am not alone. It's these natural paths that spark curiosity which are being cut off.
  - garden_hermit 6y ago
    Is there any evidence that these paths are being cut? Mod communities for video games seem like they are thriving. Look at the sheer array of Minecraft mods, or mods for nearly any popular game on Steam. Combine this with popular and easy game making software like RPGMaker, or even the ease that someone can set up a basic game on Unity. Beyond this, there are programs like Scratch and Processing that allow for fun and relatively easy computational tinkering. I doubt the natural paths of curiosity have shrunk, though they may look different. Rather, the number of people using computers has massively increased, and the number of computer "tinkerers" is just a smaller proportion of people of the larger whole.
II2II 6y ago
It's worth noting that the article is about the development of specialized hardware rather than walled gardens. In many cases this can be hugely beneficial. Not only has it allowed for the development of energy efficient hardware to watch videos on a smartphone, the same concept has allowed for the development of efficient encoding hardware for video to serve that market. Likewise, the energy efficient processors that enable media consumption have other applications. In the end we carry around a tremendous amount of general purpose computing power in our pockets. Walled gardens and specialization are somewhat different concepts. The former is primarily concerned with restricting how hardware is used, while the latter is mostly concerned with optimizing hardware for specific applications. While there are times when these two concerns can overlap, this need not be the case. This can be seen historically. Early microprocessors were developed for integer calculations, with floating point operations being done in software or with an optional floating point coprocessor. Floating point was integrated, and became a fundamental part of our notion of general purpose microprocessors, later in the game. The path taken in computer graphics was much more complex, but it is also worth noting that it started off as specialized hardware. Experimentation resulted in GPUs becoming a generalized tool. Recent developments have encouraged them to diverge into a multitude of different specialized tools. Both of these examples illustrate how specialization has broadened what can be done, without creating and environment that restricts what can be done. While I agree that walled gardens encourage media consumption at the expense of experimentation or creation, this is more of a cultural thing. There is far more money to be made in the former than the latter, so that is what the market focuses upon.
MarkusWandel 6y ago
I was a computer geek from about 1981 onwards, starting with Commodore PETs at high school. These machines were uniquely accessible. You could do surprisingly creative graphics using only the graphic characters hardwired into the machine (no bitmaps, colours or sprites). But these characters were printed right on the keyboard, and could be used in normal BASIC "PRINT" statements to do quite performant animations and such, without any advanced programming skill. That was as good as it got. The difference between a beginnner dabbling with his first PRINT loop and an advanced assembly language programmer wasn't that great because the machine was so limited; you could go from one extreme to the other in skill in a year or two if you were interested enough. My natural response to seeing the "MISER" adventure, after solving it of course, was "I have all the programming skills to make a game like that" and did so. And while then as now, only <1% of the general population was interested enough to get good at programming these things, another 10-20% was interested enough to hang around, dabble, try the latest cool programs that came down the pipe, or were made by the 1%. I had people playing a game that I made that consisted of one (long) line of BASIC. Then, it seemed, most of the rest of the population (the other 80-90%) got computers too, Commodore 64s mostly where I lived. And still, even if only a tiny minority actually programmed their own stuff, it felt like a part of a vibrant scene, you could always show off your stuff. With modern machines, even without the discouragement of locked down operating systems, missing accessible programming languages and such... there is just no hope of making something "cool" you can impress your friends with. So the tiny minority that does learn HTML5, Javascript, Arduino programming, what have you, is relatively obscure and seems to be a shadow of its former self. It isn't really. It's just that 99.99% of the computing power now in the hands of the population will never be tinkered with.
- mrob 6y ago
  >there is just no hope of making something "cool" you can impress your friends with I believe there is hope of making cool graphics effects with GPU shaders. GPU tech is still advancing similar to how CPUs were back then, so people have not yet explored all the possibilities of the hardware. You can do impressive things just by experimenting even if you don't have a lot of theoretical knowledge. Sites like shadertoy.com make it easy to get started.
- 6y ago
ekianjo 6y ago
> But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other day. > Nowadays most people I see of that age group These are not the same people at all.

fsflover 6y ago

> Nowadays most people I see of that age group are happy with a YouTube video on their smartphones. General purpose of computers is simply not visible. Have a look at GNU/Linux phones recently developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone

blowfish721 6y ago

From my perspective I think it might feel that way because back then it was mostly tech curious people who used the internet. Now it’s mainstream and everyone is connected which means most of the content is produced for massconsumation. Back when I got my first computer and got online, in around 1996 I think, the computers were still quite expensive and I would have killes to have access to the information and tinkerboards/cheap computers that are available today.

harlanji 6y ago
Maybe we could make an Internet for Age 35+ or so. Remember when one could take over Yahoo chats with Javascript? With containers and stuff, the Internet could be a lot of fun again. App battles in the park by old timers on the chess tables.
- sneak 6y ago
  It's called the internet. The things you describe are still happening across a thousand IRC servers you've never been invited to.
brainless 6y ago
I clearly remember my friends' parents being scared of me since I used to open up PCs and see what components were in them. I have been using laptops that can not be easily opened/upgraded for the last 4-5 years. Devices are being made mainly for people to consume media and that's it. I think computers of the earlier era and now are not at all comparable. The devices now are not really "computers" as they used to be. They are opaque all-soldered-and-sealed boxes. How will you inspire anyone to tinker with them? Adding a graphics card to a box was such a cool thing for all of my gamer pals. Video cards, audio cards, or any upgrades would naturally involve casual talks about tech. Who does that these days, unless you own and upgrade a desktop?
- exporectomy 6y ago
  I think you're comparing the wrong things. When I was a kid, I tinkered with clocks and watches. I thought digital ones were opaque boxes and remember calling them boring. The mechanical clocks were much more fun and reconfigurable. Does that mean we've sadly come to the end of the era of hobbyist friendly alarm clocks? Maybe, but so what? We then got computers instead. Now we have Raspberry Pi's for kids who see cellphones as boring black boxes. There's always something and it's fine if it's not the same thing it used to be. The same thing happened with cameras - people used to build their own cameras out of bits of wood and develop their own pictures from glass plates. but cheap film cameras eliminated that hobby from the mainstream. It's fine. Technology moves on. Now we have 3D printers that enable kids to make things they never could have before without access to an expensive milling machine.
- auggierose 6y ago
  I never liked to tinker with hardware. Tinkering with software was more fun, and the hardware that I can run my self-made software on is now more powerful than ever. Even an iPad, or rather, especially an iPad.

vladvasiliu 6y ago

I hear people saying this a lot, and I admit I sometimes think it myself. But I'm not sure how true it is, as opposed to just a perception. > Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years I think therein lies the rub. Teenagers curious about computers aren't very common. And even back then (early 2000s), my experience in Europe was the same [0]. Most of the people in my school didn't really care about computers. They had other interests and pursuits. The difference today is that computers are much more widespread because they allow people to do much more diverse things. At the time, they would maybe type up a report or something and that's it. There wasn't Facebook et al., so many people didn't spend any significant amount of time in front of the computer. Idle time would mostly be spent in front of the TV or hanging out with friends. I think the reason this perception comes up is that at the time, people who "spent time on computers" were doing so out of curiosity and interest in learning about them. So the shortcut is that since now many more people are spending a good chunk of their day in front of the computer, that must mean they're as interested in them as the "curious teenagers" of our time. That's simply not true. Just look at what they do on the computer. It's mostly idle scrolling on some form of social media. And, to address the subject of the OP, I'm also wondering whether there's an actual decline in the "general-purposeness" of the computer, as opposed to there just being more "non general-purpose" computers. There's a definite decline in the percentage, and maybe even in absolute numbers if we look at people who used to use computers because they had no alternative but who are now better served by smartphones or tablets and also for uses which need "specialized processors" (say ML). I draw a parallel to my feeling whenever I see discussions about iOS being locked down and people expecting the whole of the HN crowd to be up in arms about it. In my case, I was one of those curious teenagers of yore. I still love tinkering with computers, etc. But phones? I just can't be bothered to care about them. Can I make calls and check some maps? It's great! I have an iPhone and treat it pretty much like a dishwasher. I barely have any apps installed. Neither allows me to install whatever random app I want. It's not an issue for my dishwasher, and frankly, nor is it for my iPhone. Whatever "general computing" I feel like doing, I prefer doing it on an actual computer. Of course, there are other philosophical considerations in this discussion which I understand and can get behind, but the point is that, to many people, a computer is an appliance. They want it to do certain things. Does it do that? Great! If it doesn't, it's not fit for purpose. They simply do not care if some guy some where would like to do some thing with it but can't because Microsot / Apple are locking it down. --- [0] I went to school in the suburbs of Paris, so many of the kids' parents were pretty well-off and many were even working in computer-related fields, so there wasn't any access problem. Practically all of them actually had at least one up-to-date computer at home.

javajosh 6y ago

Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce. A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for, which means "walled gardens", patents, DRM, license servers, anti-tampering mechanisms, and the like. In essence all content (music, movies, software, books, etc) follows the same pattern. Note that profit-driven entities can give away software, but only if it supports another artificially scarce good. Google rents space on its search tool, as Facebook rents space on its social media tool. Ad space is scarce, and made more valuable the more Google and Facebook give away (which is proportional to the attention they capture). But devs generally don't like artificial scarcity, so the platforms need a path in for them. I think Apple demonstrates this most clearly: the iPad and iPhone are software consumption devices, but the Mac is also a software creation device, and therefore is generally more open, free, and changeable.

vanderZwan 6y ago
> Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce. A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for, which means "walled gardens", patents, DRM, license servers, anti-tampering mechanisms, and the like. In essence all content (music, movies, software, books, etc) follows the same pattern. You remind me of Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation" keynote, which interestingly didn't notice that streaming and similar cloud-based services would become the DRM of the last decade. Or, as it turns out, the rising appeal of non-general purpose devices that are more efficient. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg [1] https://joshuawise.com/28c3-transcript https://joshuawise.com/28c3-transcript
hypertele-Xii 6y ago
Linux is software, Linux is economically worth a lot, Linux isn't artificially scarce.
- IQunder130 6y ago
  Control of where Linux development is going is indeed economically worth a lot. Copies of the Linux kernel are near enough to worthless for the distinction not to matter.

8draco8 6y ago

Classic PC and even some laptops especially with open operating systems are still fantastic tool for learning and tinkering. There's just more options now for people that simply wants to consume media without thinking too much about everything else. PC enthusiast scene is getting bigger every year.

user-the-name 6y ago
Learn what? Installing Linux on a computer doesn't really teach you anything much at all about computers. It teaches you about Linux.
- sriku 6y ago
  That's today, but it wasn't so initially. You'd learn about your monitor's scan modes, how the disk is structured, dumping bytes between devices, optimizing for load by placing bytes on the outer sectors of floppy disks, using RAM as a disk to speed things up, and whole lot of "useless" things that build machine sympathy.
  - 8draco8 6y ago
    Well you still have easier and more difficult distros. You can go easy route and play with Ubuntu or Fedora but you can approach linux from the hard side and try Arch or Gentoo
  - randcraw 6y ago
    Yes, but it's also true that drivers and peripherals are generally a lot more complicated today and hardware services more federated across layers of dependency and security than in the days of DOS or Windows 3. Reverse engineering today's Windows 10 wifi-based encrypted RAID disk array is a good deal trickier than a 30 year-old DOS FAT IDE drive ever was.
- G3n0t 6y ago
  Non sense. Linux makes many details about computers much more explicit than Windows does. Even installing Ubuntu teaches you something about how computers boot, what partitions are and file systems do. Linux also makes it easy to get started in programming on the OS level -- thanks to the Internet it is way easier to find information about how everything works. So from a learning experience perspective, a kid tinkering with Linux might gain more insight into how computers work and than, say, on Windows or Mac.

jacquesm 6y ago

The mainstream was never going to be part of the tinkerers and hackers. But the depressing thing is to what extent todays hackers have become consumers. But, we've still got linux and a lot of hardware support for that. I'll likely be the last bastion of general purpose computing.

rimliu 6y ago
No, the depressing thing is how many people on HN want others to be just like them.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  Which is why certain people question "culture fit" as an exhaustive reason for not hiring

watwut 6y ago

You cant compare back-then-yourself to general population now and assume the comparison is good comparison between generations. Plenty of your peers were not on those chat rooms. They did not interacted with tech like you or even did not interacted with tech at all. They had different hobbies and interests, different habits then you.

koonsolo 6y ago

Why the negative outlook? The world now is way more awesome for hackers than it was back then! 1. You can find any information you want, in an instant. 2. Hardware is very cheap, computers can be tiny, you can order components from anywhere 3. Robotics and electronics are way cooler now, with drones etc. 4. Software development is way more productive with all the libraries and tools we have right now. 5. When I was a kid, games were made by 1 or a few people. It quickly evolved into big studios. But nowadays, a solo or tiny team can release super successful games.

kuschku 6y ago
> 2. Hardware is very cheap, computers can be tiny, you can order components from anywhere In the past I could get any component I might need from a local store in 20 minutes. now I've got 2 weeks to 3 months turnaround on shipping from shenzhen.
- krageon 6y ago
  I really miss hardware shops now that you pointed this out :(
- StavrosK 6y ago
  In the past, there were only enough components to fill a few shelves. Also, you can get many, many components from local stores now, if you're willing to pay the 4x-10x premium. Not many people are, so local stores aren't as common.
  - kuschku 6y ago
    In 2010, the local store had more components than I can order at reichelt, and was cheaper than aliexpress (if you include shipping). I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need, and with enough technical expertise that you could show your circuit diagram and get feedback how to improve it. This is something only seen in shenzhen today. Now I just don't do any small projects anymore as there are no stores in the entire state left, and the extreme premium in shipping and waiting time of aliexpress just isn't worth it anymore.

ajsnigrutin 6y ago

The percentage of people who tinkered and explored, and did all the fun stuff back then is probably still the same as now. But back then most of the "normal" people didn't use the internet at all, and now use it for youtube and facebook.

cosmodisk 6y ago

I feel very similar. It took less than 2 decades to go from tinkers, creators,and just general curiosity, to somewhat mindless consumption of videos,or photos. When the Covid wave started last year, we had to assess who has necessary equipment at home to be able to work remotely. A lot of people don't even have a computer at home,all they need is a phone or a tablet, which are created for consumption,not to be creative with it.

visarga 6y ago

> Nowadays most people I see of that age group are happy with a YouTube video on their smartphones. YouTube is a fantastic resource for any hobby or subject. It's like a world wide university.

smk_ 6y ago
Except that the algorithm is optimized for revenue and attention-grabbing content (the opposite of university material), and will gradually steer watching habits in that direction.

yowlingcat 6y ago

The challenge with technology these days is that while the capabilities have gone in one direction, the culture has not necessarily gone in the direction many of us who came of age during an earlier era wish it might have. To some extent, I guess this is just a part of what happens when cutting edge things go mainstream -- no frontier lasts forever, sadly.

IgorPartola 6y ago

The difference is that those people who are happy with YouTube videos wouldn’t have been tinkering with computers in 2006. You have to remember that tinkering with computers was and still is a nerdy niche. Let’s say there are 1000 people in the world. Of those, 10 are hackers (in the “tinker with computers” sense, not on the malicious sense), 20 are enthusiasts, the rest are neither. In 1990, you’d have 15 people on the net talking about computers and doing stuff with them. Everyone else is watching TV, reading books, whatever. In 2006, you have 100 people: 10 hackers, 20 enthusiasts, 70 people who found cat videos. In 2021 you have 990 people on the net: same hackers abs enthusiasts but also a whole bunch of people who are here for the cat videos. Does that detract from what the 10 hackers are doing? I don’t think so. In fact, it adds opportunity to the hackers and enthusiasts. We didn’t lose the hacker spirit. Go look at hackaday.com to see what people are working on. We simply gained an audience.

bigsuperlatives 6y ago
Somehow related: > //i.ibb.co/3Sv29Qs/23340-en-REVIEW-FINAL-Mail.png ^^
nightski 6y ago
You are creating a false dichotomy of cat videos vs. hacker. I've watched a cat video or two. I've also spent the vast majority of my life programming (coming up on 40). My point is, video games were my gateway to programming. I got into mods and then expanded from there. I'm sure I am not alone. It's these natural paths that spark curiosity which are being cut off.
- garden_hermit 6y ago
  Is there any evidence that these paths are being cut? Mod communities for video games seem like they are thriving. Look at the sheer array of Minecraft mods, or mods for nearly any popular game on Steam. Combine this with popular and easy game making software like RPGMaker, or even the ease that someone can set up a basic game on Unity. Beyond this, there are programs like Scratch and Processing that allow for fun and relatively easy computational tinkering. I doubt the natural paths of curiosity have shrunk, though they may look different. Rather, the number of people using computers has massively increased, and the number of computer "tinkerers" is just a smaller proportion of people of the larger whole.

II2II 6y ago

It's worth noting that the article is about the development of specialized hardware rather than walled gardens. In many cases this can be hugely beneficial. Not only has it allowed for the development of energy efficient hardware to watch videos on a smartphone, the same concept has allowed for the development of efficient encoding hardware for video to serve that market. Likewise, the energy efficient processors that enable media consumption have other applications. In the end we carry around a tremendous amount of general purpose computing power in our pockets. Walled gardens and specialization are somewhat different concepts. The former is primarily concerned with restricting how hardware is used, while the latter is mostly concerned with optimizing hardware for specific applications. While there are times when these two concerns can overlap, this need not be the case. This can be seen historically. Early microprocessors were developed for integer calculations, with floating point operations being done in software or with an optional floating point coprocessor. Floating point was integrated, and became a fundamental part of our notion of general purpose microprocessors, later in the game. The path taken in computer graphics was much more complex, but it is also worth noting that it started off as specialized hardware. Experimentation resulted in GPUs becoming a generalized tool. Recent developments have encouraged them to diverge into a multitude of different specialized tools. Both of these examples illustrate how specialization has broadened what can be done, without creating and environment that restricts what can be done. While I agree that walled gardens encourage media consumption at the expense of experimentation or creation, this is more of a cultural thing. There is far more money to be made in the former than the latter, so that is what the market focuses upon.

MarkusWandel 6y ago

I was a computer geek from about 1981 onwards, starting with Commodore PETs at high school. These machines were uniquely accessible. You could do surprisingly creative graphics using only the graphic characters hardwired into the machine (no bitmaps, colours or sprites). But these characters were printed right on the keyboard, and could be used in normal BASIC "PRINT" statements to do quite performant animations and such, without any advanced programming skill. That was as good as it got. The difference between a beginnner dabbling with his first PRINT loop and an advanced assembly language programmer wasn't that great because the machine was so limited; you could go from one extreme to the other in skill in a year or two if you were interested enough. My natural response to seeing the "MISER" adventure, after solving it of course, was "I have all the programming skills to make a game like that" and did so. And while then as now, only <1% of the general population was interested enough to get good at programming these things, another 10-20% was interested enough to hang around, dabble, try the latest cool programs that came down the pipe, or were made by the 1%. I had people playing a game that I made that consisted of one (long) line of BASIC. Then, it seemed, most of the rest of the population (the other 80-90%) got computers too, Commodore 64s mostly where I lived. And still, even if only a tiny minority actually programmed their own stuff, it felt like a part of a vibrant scene, you could always show off your stuff. With modern machines, even without the discouragement of locked down operating systems, missing accessible programming languages and such... there is just no hope of making something "cool" you can impress your friends with. So the tiny minority that does learn HTML5, Javascript, Arduino programming, what have you, is relatively obscure and seems to be a shadow of its former self. It isn't really. It's just that 99.99% of the computing power now in the hands of the population will never be tinkered with.

mrob 6y ago
>there is just no hope of making something "cool" you can impress your friends with I believe there is hope of making cool graphics effects with GPU shaders. GPU tech is still advancing similar to how CPUs were back then, so people have not yet explored all the possibilities of the hardware. You can do impressive things just by experimenting even if you don't have a lot of theoretical knowledge. Sites like shadertoy.com make it easy to get started.
6y ago

ekianjo 6y ago

> But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other day. > Nowadays most people I see of that age group These are not the same people at all.