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I have a story similar to many of the others here. Mine was in the mid 90s when a kid could make good money developing websites. The hardest part was the clien

I have a story similar to many of the others here. Mine was in the mid 90s when a kid could make good money developing websites. The hardest part was the client interactions, which is not something a 14 year old is particularly good at. But the real take-away is that this era of computing was a true green field for the kids growing up in it. My cousins, who are over 10 years younger than me, grew up in a totally different world and, despite having used computers their whole life, have no idea how they work or how to build stuff with them. A childhood spent writing batch files in order to run DOS X-Wing is very different than one spent loading a CD into the 1st gen Xbox. I feel bad for my own kids, who are surrounded by technology that is walled off and inaccessible. Even 'View Source' on web pages is virtually useless now-a-days. It's a lot harder to get into the internals of systems than it used to be.

jkestner 5y ago
Absolutely. I want to make products that are accessible under the hood. It‘s not for computers any more, but then there are many other objects we’re adding computing to. In the meantime, I’ll start the kids on my old Apple ][e if I can smuggle it by my spouse.
realaether 5y ago
I had a long conversation about this a week ago. My worry is that "hacking" things — in the sense of "finding a way to use a program in a way that the developer didn't directly intend" — is getting harder every year and that this may have implications for the next generations of developers and indeed power users. "View source" is not only virtually useless on many pages, but also unreasonably difficult to access in the first place (if not completely impossible) on systems like iOS. UX, generally, seems so rigid now that, especially if it's on a more locked-down platform or a web-app, it seems there's often almost no way to use an app in any way other than the developer intended. The barrier to entry for hacking seems incredibly high now. I don't know when the concepts of batch processing and scripting — or even keyboard shortcuts — came to be seen as a hindrance to UX, but I have a feeling it developed in parallel with touchscreens and the ever-increasing incentive to make apps addictive. In that respect it seems like we haven't really evolved in the last 10 years (at least), but actually regressed to some pre-computer, pre-automation age. Perhaps everything I've just written is a load of rambling nostalgia. These thoughts come to me almost on a daily basis though.

jkestner 5y ago

Absolutely. I want to make products that are accessible under the hood. It‘s not for computers any more, but then there are many other objects we’re adding computing to. In the meantime, I’ll start the kids on my old Apple ][e if I can smuggle it by my spouse.

realaether 5y ago

I had a long conversation about this a week ago. My worry is that "hacking" things — in the sense of "finding a way to use a program in a way that the developer didn't directly intend" — is getting harder every year and that this may have implications for the next generations of developers and indeed power users. "View source" is not only virtually useless on many pages, but also unreasonably difficult to access in the first place (if not completely impossible) on systems like iOS. UX, generally, seems so rigid now that, especially if it's on a more locked-down platform or a web-app, it seems there's often almost no way to use an app in any way other than the developer intended. The barrier to entry for hacking seems incredibly high now. I don't know when the concepts of batch processing and scripting — or even keyboard shortcuts — came to be seen as a hindrance to UX, but I have a feeling it developed in parallel with touchscreens and the ever-increasing incentive to make apps addictive. In that respect it seems like we haven't really evolved in the last 10 years (at least), but actually regressed to some pre-computer, pre-automation age. Perhaps everything I've just written is a load of rambling nostalgia. These thoughts come to me almost on a daily basis though.