12 ms·

The Home Computer Generation

170 points by stargrave 4y ago

gumby 4y ago
What a whinge. > Being a digital native doesn't automatically mean you're computer savvy. What it actually means is that these generations operate at higher levels of abstraction. Even the "computer builders" of the past couple of decades merely snapped together lego bricks designed by others. And anyway, in the "old days" you spent at least as much time looking after your system as actually using it (I was shocked how my PC friends had disk optimizers and anti-virus and whatnot). But back then it was part of the fun, as it is for hams. But kids these days have too many important things to do than to become computer hams.
- djaychela 4y ago
  > What a whinge. Strong disagree here. >What it actually means is that these generations operate at higher levels of abstraction. That may be true, but I don't think it's necessarily a good thing. In the analogy of a car driver, if you don't know how the car works aside from driving it, then you are worse off in many respects. If it behaves oddly, you have no idea what is wrong, no idea how to fix it, and (in my experience) are a lot more likely to pay significantly more to do so. For many today, computers are a complete mystery - indeed I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid. They have become magical devices that seem beyond comprehension for many, and I think that's to the detriment of everyone. >And anyway, in the "old days" you spent at least as much time looking after your system as actually using it Also not true. Didn't spend -any- time looking after my ZX Spectrum. Just turned it on and either started writing software straight away, or loaded a game up. Maintenance was not a thing. >But kids these days have too many important things to do That has certainly not been my experience as a parent. They have lots of things to do, but I don't think much of it is important. It's just attention-grabbing.
  - jmrm 4y ago
    >> But kids these days have too many important things to do > That has certainly not been my experience as a parent. They have lots of things to do, but I don't think much of it is important. It's just attention-grabbing. I think those "important things to do" means "extracurricular activities", that probably isn't so important to you or to me, but we know other parent that doesn't let their children have any time for themself due to those activities, they are. We're talking about learning a new language, learning to play some musical instrument, or even playing some sport in a local team. Both now and when I was a child I know and knew a lot of parent who stressed a lot, and stressed a lot their child, because they didn't sense them to advance in those activities and pressured them a lot to improve in that.
  - danaris 4y ago
    > I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid. I think that's only true if that "proportionally" means "proportional to the number of people who have to work with computers on a daily basis". I don't know exactly when you were a kid, but from the ZX Spectrum comment, I'd guess it was in the early 1980s. I guarantee you more people, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to the total population, know concrete things about how computers work now than did then. Huge percentages of the population of the world had never even seen a computer when the ZX Spectrum was current. Computer Science curriculum (and related fields) was still, relatively speaking, in its infancy, and the number of institutions that even had anything that could be reasonably termed a functioning CS (or, again, related) department was fairly small. Today, yes, there are a lot of people who know very little about how computers work, even though nearly everyone (especially in the Western world) uses computers on a daily basis. There are even a lot of people with tech-related degrees who don't know the full ins and outs of how computers work even at a medium level of abstraction. But there are so many more people who have had the opportunity to learn about computers because of their ubiquity. There are so many more people who have, either through formal education or otherwise, learned how an operating system loads drivers, or how a file system manages space, or how a program allocates and frees memory, than in the early 1980s. I believe what you are seeing is the difference between a world where, when there was someone you could talk to about computers at all, they had to know how they worked in order to use them effectively, and a world where computers are so widespread everyone uses them, and so user-friendly that the vast majority of people never need to know or care how to do anything remotely like changing the jumpers on a SCSI drive or the dip switches on a sound card.
    - jarvist 4y ago
      I don't think this is true, at least in the UK. The BBC computer literacy project meant that there were BBC Model Bs in every UK school, with tie-in educational materials. In the early 90s my entire class at a run of the mill state primary school took turns pair-programming LOGO on the school's BBC Micro. I don't think you can get more ubiquitous than every single human having programmed a loop and subroutine.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    > my ZX Spectrum I'd hazard a guess OP meant early personal computers with something like Win 95, not underpowered microcontrollers.
    - technothrasher 4y ago
      By the time Win 95 rolled around, personal computers were well past the early stage, and the Z80 was neither underpowered nor a microcontroller. So I’m not sure what you’re saying, exactly.
      - moffkalast 4y ago
        I'm saying that even an Arduino is faster than a ZX Spectrum, so yes I would place it firmly in that category as it wouldn't exactly be able to run anything advanced enough to warrant maintenance. > By the time Win 95 rolled around, personal computers were well past the early stage That's a matter of perspective really, in 100 years even what's modern today will be considered early.
  - elzbardico 4y ago
    By the same token we could consider watching TV just a higher level of abstraction than being an amateur radio enthusiast. It would be technically correct while completely absurd in the real world.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    With respect to cars though, they are more reliable and problems are almost certainly harder for them to fix on the road or in the home garage. It's probably useful to have some notion of how cars operate in general. But I suspect fewer and fewer have deep knowledge and certainly the ability/interest to do their own auto repairs of any consequence.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    > For many today, computers are a complete mystery - indeed I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid. They have become magical devices that seem beyond comprehension for many, and I think that's to the detriment of everyone. Yeah but did you understand how RAM chips worked? How processors worked? How registers and power supplies worked? Could you wire wrap a board? The previous generation of computer users knew how those things worked and often wired them up themselves. Most of these arguments are emotional. We, as computer practitioners, are dismayed that the general public doesn't value our knowledge. But should they? Are the kids who actually want to learn about computers not able to learn about them? I grew up fairly poor as a kid in the '80s-90s and most of my friends didn't have access to a computer at home. They learned the bare minimum they needed in the school library to finish homework assignments but otherwise didn't care. I was interested in computers and would go dumpster diving to find parts, but my friends didn't care. I'd say the cohort that had the money, time, and inclination to have computers as kids in the 1980s was much smaller than those who want to nowadays.
- teddyh 4y ago
  I mostly agree with you¹, however, it is a problem if the current computing environments does not actually allow people to do anything of their own. Just like 80’s computers had BASIC, there should be Flash-like authoring programs which people could write shareable programs on. But there aren’t! Specifically the sharing part, I mean. You can’t write a simple Poke the Penguin app and send it to your friend for fun anymore. You’re at the whims of enormous gatekeepers and censors. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106922#19113359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106922#19113359
  - corrral 4y ago
    You can send Swift Playgrounds apps to other people over messages. To pick just one example, from what's often the main target of these "LOL these aren't real computers" sorts of complaints. If you're on a desktop, there are tons of ways, most more accessible than Back In My Day. I do think we lost something when Flash in particular died, but less apps/games (there are... a lot of very, very indie games made these days by solo hobbyists or enthusiasts, check places like itch.io, it's an overwhelming number) and more the independent animation scene, which was huge during the heyday of flash but seems mostly dead now.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    There's environments like Scratch, Jupyter notebooks, Minecraft, and even Roblox where kids definitely build experiences for each other. The problem is, standards have gotten a lot higher these days. When I was a kid, I fooled around and made RPGs that looked similar to the ones that my friends played on home consoles. Now a AAA game will be much more engaging than anything a kid can put together. These days it's become much simpler to put together attractive videos which is why so many kids want to become streamers. Buy a nice camera and a few lights and you can produce media that looked like movies I watched as a kid.
    - cmsj 4y ago
      > Now a AAA game will be much more engaging than anything a kid can put together. Two thoughts: 1) I kinda agree, and it's interesting how many of the founders of game studios who are now retiring, got their start on the 8/16bit home computers as teenagers making games that were the AAA titles of their day, because the upper bounds on game size/complexity were so low. 2) There has never been a better time for free tooling and instruction for kids who are interested in building games. Unreal Engine 5 and the thousands of hours of youtube tutorials for it, is quite a starting point to have. It puts the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit that I would have spent hours in, in the 90s, to complete shame!
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Things are mostly fine as they are(Aside from the rise of locked down, mandatory encrypted, cloud dependent stuff), but people definitely have lost some computer literacy. Not that they lost much that they couldn't google, even programming is easier than ever, the hard stuff is specialist work like OS and hardware design. It's not like we need average people to know ASM and C. But people do seem to have lost some of the interest. As I've said before, programming is easier than most other human activities, things like playing guitar or being a cashier are not only hard, they require skills that can't even be described fully. But programming/IT/etc still takes time to learn, and I do think people probably are somewhat fried from all the short form content and less interested in anything that has a slow and careful process.
  - wvenable 4y ago
    Programming might be easy but software development is incredibly difficult. The average person will be hundreds of times more successful picking up a guitar or being a cashier than releasing a useful piece of software. Software development is incredibly difficult and a lot of people who are employed programmers aren't very good at it.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      Picking up a guitar might be easy; playing an instrument well is hard. They say it takes ten years; I'd say it takes about that long to be a good software developer. And like being a musician, most people bail out before they've learned. A few people stick with it and still don't get good (the management promotion route is this way!). Let's pass over the cashier thing; I was a cashier exactly once, on an exchange trip, so in a foreign language. I got the hang of it in about 20 minutes.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Writing stable, production-ready software is a grind. The personalities in software teams are often grumpy. I know many junior engineers who loved writing code and were dismayed at what went into writing production-grade software. Some of them moved to startups where the stakes were lower or they could work on MVPs, many transitioned into roles like PM or sales engineer, but a decent chunk just left software altogether. I love software so I won't leave but I know it's not for everyone.
- incanus77 4y ago
  I would disagree, that operating a computer or computerized system is not necessarily being computer savvy. That is what the author is trying to say. I have long felt that when you have experienced the lower or lowest levels of abstraction, even in archaic times, you develop an intuition about how a thing works or how a problem might be fixed, or how to properly scrutinize or be suspicious of a particular new form of tech (itself often implemented at these higher levels). One example would be diagnosing "bad internet" by evaluating the wifi signal strength & interference from similar channels, the cable/fiber modem basic functionality and firmware version, the cable quality and function, the networking card in the computer, the function of the software behind it, the browser behavior, caching, or getting "wedged" somehow, the DNS resolver or its cache, an OS bug... it goes on and on. The flip side of this is: everything is fricking multilayered and complicated! And it sucks! But that's unfortunately what we've got when you have so many layers involved. Disclaimer: I'm firmly in the demographic described in the article.
- richardjdare 4y ago
  When I upgraded from an Amstrad CPC to an Amiga in 1989, I gained access to a higher level of abstration, like you said. Unlike the Amstrad, the Amiga had a GUI and a proper command line. But unlike the information kiosk-esque devices of today, my Amiga let me navigate its layers of abstraction as I saw fit. These layers represented another dimension of usability. They were meant to be used and navigated. Today we commonly think of a new layer of abstraction as if it "saves us" from the scary stuff underneath. We pave over what's underneath and pretend we are still standing on the ground. (Web interfaces are a good example. If I want to make a custom web widget I have to make it using form elements. If I am making a new widget in a desktop GUI, I make it using the same drawing and event primitives that the built-in widgets use. My new widget then sits at the same level of abstraction as the built-in widgets, and the overall system is preserved.) Even modern desktops suck in this regard. Navigating the layers of abstraction is like being an archaeologist uncovering scenes of historical catastrophe in the folded and shattered strata of our systems.
forrestbrazeal 4y ago
A neighbor of mine, a professor at an excellent private college who teaches a stats class where the students are required to do a bit of programming, told me the other day that she's noticed a cycle in her students over the past few years. 15 years ago the students tended to come in knowing more about navigating their computers than she did; now, and especially in the last 4-5 years, she's increasingly having to teach them basic computer literacy in order to get to the learning they're actually supposed to be doing. This has contributed to my resolve not to let my son have an iPad, but he can have a laptop pretty much when he wants one.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  I'm currently in the process of buying various old Commodore hardware (C64, A500, A1200) and investing in better tooling (just got an Oscilloscope) for this reason. My oldest son (8) and daughter (6) are both interested and at an age where I can introduce them to electronics and computing. When I was my son's age I was already building simple radio receivers (crystal + transistor) so they're old enough to start with these machines. Laptops will just get used for web games and youtube anyhow.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Did you consider teaching them using something where the learning is more collaborative, where you are not an expert? Scratch, Roblox, etcetera. Part of the joy of learning the home computer was the feeling of being on the leading edge.
- _fjb4 4y ago
  I had a friend tell me recently that he had to teach a (high school) intern how to navigate the Windows taskbar and use the Control-C and Control-V shortcuts on the keyboard. I thought he was joking until he mentioned that the student mostly used mobile devices at home and school and rarely used a PC. Apparently schools nowadays are replacing their laptop fleets with iPads and all that.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
Terr_ 4y ago
The flip-side of this decay in the richness of the experience is that things are more idiot-proofed for mass consumption. I believe that's the driving factor behind grandparents saying "kids these days are so good with the computers" etc. Older generations grew up with machines that you could actually ruin unless you read the manual, leading to hesitancy and trepidation with the new stuff. (Which often eschews documentation entirely.) In contrast, younger generations are more likely to assume (often correctly) that they are free to try randomly poking icons and twiddling dials until something looks promising. Seen from the outside--especially by that older generation--this confidence can be mistaken as expertise. (This is similar to how some people will consider you a magician if you open up a command-line prompt.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  You won't get very far poking randomly in a command prompt though - at least a few memorized spells are required to perform magic
  - kfarr 4y ago
    You might be surprised much time kids have on their hands. Typing help on old school dos prompt gave some hints iirc. Somehow I found qbasic, maybe just listing some directory which started an endless rabbit hole of self learning for me.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      > Somehow I found qbasic, maybe just listing some directory which started an endless rabbit hole of self learning for me. The qbasic IDE was incredibly intuitive, it's sad that we don't have something closely modeled on it today (or on Turbo Pascal/C++) as a default terminal-friendly dev experience. Equally disappointing that the most common window-based IDE is some sort of Electron- and JavaScript-based monstrosity.
  - 4y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Reminds me of the Purdue Boilermakers. The Purdue University has as their mascot, the boilermaker. It always seems such a weird mascot for an engineering school. However, when they were founded, steam boilers were at the cutting edge of engineering. They were what powered railroads and steamships. And the high pressures and temperatures pushed the limits on metallurgy and reliability. There were many people killed because a boiler exploded. So at that time, "Boilermaker" suggested attention to detail, and broad technical knowledge. Now not so much. Every generation builds on the foundation laid before, and tries to achieve new things.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  Building and maintaining boilers is a highly regulated industry still; with the fairly reasonable justification that they can blow up big if you screw it up. Wonder if they still teach anything specific to that.
chaoticmass 4y ago
Being born in 1985 and having grown up with home computers, starting with the IBM PC jr and BASIC, through to a 386 with QBasic, and then a Pentium with Visual Basic, this essay resonates with me a lot. It's not just the actual knowledge I picked up which has served me well, but also gaining a general intuition about how computers work. Probably most important of all though is learning how to learn. It's this skill that I am sure I will rely on most over time as my esoteric knowledge becomes more and more irrelevant.
- cmsj 4y ago
  Yeah that intuition is invaluable. It's what makes us the family "computer guy/girl", and is why we can help someone who uses some piece of software every day, that we have never seen before, figure out how to do some thing they want to do. I try to tell people this, when I help them - I don't know everything about every piece of software, I just have a sense of what the operation they want to do will probably be like, and the confidence to poke around until I find it because I also have a sense of what is likely to be a destructive operation.
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    Tech Support Cheat Sheet: https://xkcd.com/627/ https://xkcd.com/627/
    - nocman 4y ago
      As is often the case, the mouseover text on that XKCD just makes the comic!
- mjevans 4y ago
  Earlier versions of Windows and like programs used to be far more discoverable. Self documenting. The menu system could be intuitively accessed by a mouse, without learning anything specific. It was common for Alt + Underlined menu letter to Open that menu directly. Underlined letters IN the menu items would quick-select an item from that menu. Items that were expected to be commonly used, that had direct keyboard shortcuts, told the end user the shortcut. The design was simple, categorized, and discoverable. Self documenting end user education. Now we have ribbons... useless ribbons that make everything slower.
causality0 4y ago
more computer literate than the generations both preceding and, to the confusion of the aforementioned pundits, succeeding us. This is the most terrifying thing to me. I spent my early adulthood watching all my leisure activity interests like sci-fi, videogames, superheroes, the web, etc go far more mainstream than I could've imagined without bringing along the behaviors they fostered. How can someone spend five hours a day online without caring how it works? It's like being a professional chef without knowing what a farm is. I expected the youth of today to be technological wizards, not a bunch of trained monkeys.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  All humans are trained monkeys. Some of those monkeys are self-trained on technological wizardry. Why are you comparing hobbies to professional cooking? I'm glad I can cook without having to farm, and I'd expect most people to be glad they can browse the web without expert knowledge in HTTP.
  - causality0 4y ago
    Yes, but you know what a farm is. You know that animals reproduce, that their infants grow by eating vegetable matter. I can't write HTML either, but I know that it's text which describes the content and layout of a web page. I have younger relatives who don't know what a file is. They don't comprehend that a document and a picture and a video and an audio track are all same sort of thing interpreted in a different way.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      Most people's (in the US's) mental image of a farm is probably way different from the likely-very-industrialized farms that are actually producing most of their food. Strikes me as fairly similar to the surface-level of understanding they have about "apps" and "operating systems" and "memory," actually.
      - wngr 4y ago
cmsj 4y ago
I enjoyed the nostalgia of this piece, but in general I suspect that the proportion of the population who are predisposed to be "computer nerds" as we were often known in the 80s/90s, is pretty much the same. While the systems themselves may not force those people to be confronted with the inner workings from the first flick of the power switch, the barrier of entry is so much lower now than it used to be, if you are interested in that stuff and want to try it. I was only able to buy an Amiga in 1990 because one of my grandmothers died and left me some money - £399 at the time, but adjusted for inflation that's £800. A suitably motivated person these days could choose to buy a Raspberry Pi for 5% of that and they'd just need a keyboard/mouse/tv which are easy to come by for little/no money. I don't think we should expect everyone to be computer literate, and I welcome the era of appliance computing for the utility it provides (although I do grumble when my OSes/devices lose features in the name of simplicity), but I do think we should try to expose more young people to "real" computing, so the ones who are predisposed to love it, can get that opportunity. For that reason I'm buying each of my kids a Pi for their 10th birthday - they get two SD cards, one with Raspbian and one with RetroPie and it's up to them which they boot during their screen time (or neither, if they would prefer to just watch TV or play xbox). I was hooked from day one of having a computer in the house, but I don't need them to be hooked too.
- orev 4y ago
  > I suspect that the proportion of the population who are predisposed to be "computer nerds" as we were often known in the 80s/90s, is pretty much the same. Possibly. But the fact that owning a PC essentially forced the exposure to happen undoubtedly caused more seeds to grow. It’s far too easy these days to never encounter that friction, and therefore people with latent skills simply go into something else (or worse, never find another passion).
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  I'm not sure about the barrier to entry. Sure, buying a computer is much cheaper, but the things you can do have been intentionally restricted - there's an entire industry thriving on artificial unefficiency - the sort of thing that computers were meant to obviate. Imagine a teenager wanting to search for & automatically "like" Facebook pages about their favorite band. Where would you even start, considering Facebook intentionally makes that difficult with fear-mongering about "security" and lays traps that will ban your account if they detect automated activity? Same with all the other mainstream services. It's much harder nowadays to make computers do anything "useful" when everything is intentionally siloed into proprietary apps & services that intentionally prevent interoperability. > For that reason I'm buying each of my kids a Pi for their 10th birthday I'd suggest getting them an older laptop with good Linux support - a dual-core/4GB RAM ThinkPad can be obtained for relatively cheap and has the advantage that it's still very similar to modern computers especially early on in the boot process (x86 as opposed to the Pi's ARM architecture) so any low-level skills they'd learn while breaking & fixing it would also apply to most computers out there.
themadturk 4y ago
I'm rather an oddity here...I came to microcomputers as a young adult, rather than as a kid, but I consider myself very much of the "home computer generation," and being part of it led to my career. Because of the time my children were born, they were very much inheritors of this. My eldest son grew up sitting in my lap, watching the Norton disk optimizer clean up my hard disk. He and his brother build their own gaming machines, etc. But reading this article, and some of the comments here, I wonder, isn't this what we were always working toward? Isn't it OK that we're reaching a point where computing devices are ubiquitous and nearly everyone can pick one up and make use of it? My kids are digital natives, but my wife didn't find computers useful until she got an iPad, and it's enriched her life greatly. She's not technical, never has been, and always avoided "complicated" computers. I think we've merely passed into a different era of computing. For some people it's not as fun, perhaps not as lucrative, but for many more people it's (arguably) more empowering and useful.
- kcexn 4y ago
  There's also an argument to be made about complexity. While the average home user in the past could with effort learn the ins and outs of a DOS system, there is no way the average home user would have the time, energy, or experience to learn the ins and outs of how Windows 10 it 11 even begins to work. The author briefly mentions that Arch Linux users are making an informed choice. But he fails to mention how few users, even amongst the hardcore Linux crowd use a base Arch build with no pre-built configurations. Most Linux users in the Arch community use Arch based distros like Manjaro. Getting a base Arch distro is fairly hardcore, you boot into an environment that has minimal drivers and is for all intents and purposes, is not functional. You then spend the next many hours configuring it to get a basic, kinda usable system. Followed by many weeks and months of tweaking to get it to a place where you might be happy to use it on a daily basis. This is because modern computing systems have hundreds or thousands of components that need to work together, most environments hide the integration of all of these parts to the user, because even the most sophisticated and educated users find it tedious to manually integrate all of that. And Arch is considered baby steps compared to say Gentoo or even Linux From Scratch. Which don't even try to hide operating system level details from the user like Arch does. Quickly if you play with either of those environments you will learn that modern general purpose computer operating systems are many orders of magnitude more complicated than 50 years ago. That's why they require teams of professionals to tune properly. There are whole businesses in enterprise computing (Redhat, SUSE, WindRiver) whose entire business revolves around helping customers tune their OS for production loads. This is entirely because OS's have become so overwhelmingly complex that most companies can't afford to keep in-house expertise. Now, there's an argument that maybe all of this complexity isn't necessary. But efforts to cut down on complexity has led us down the path of specialised computing, largely powered by hardware acceleration using FPGAs and ASICs, which is an entirely different beast to software. To summarise the rant: In pursuit of performance, and quality. We've made computing enormously complicated with massive barriers to entry. It would not be feasible for users to have to learn about the nitty gritty details of computing before being able to use their computers.
harrylepotter 4y ago
10 PRINT "FUCK" 20 GOTO 10 …still makes me giggle
- jrm4 4y ago
  Oh, in my intro IT classes I do a whole thing about 10 PRINT "John is AWESOME 20 GOTO 10 ..and little 10 year old me discovering how to BE GOD BY HARNESSING THE POWER OF INFINITY in your computer.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    At around 12 years (having learned some extremely basic Q-BASIC from a book, no computer at home to test it on) I co-wrote a scareware with a friend from school on their family computer. It would fake formatting your computer. We knew about GOTO, but not about loops (or faking them with GOTO). So we copy and pasted the same line 100 times and edited the number in every line :D Good times ;)
- agiacalone 4y ago
  I got in trouble for doing this very thing in middle school on an Apple ][. :D
ggm 4y ago
Everyone likes to consider themselves exceptional. For a long time, I used to say "oh, this passed me by because I had access to a mainframe (smirk)" but I now realise I was in the cohort, and just made other life choices. The fact I had access to a mainframe had nothing to do with it. At best? it was post-hoc reasoning. I certainly knew people who assembled their own from kits, one who made their own from 74xx series logic and discrete parts, many who bought. I didn't do any of these things but I felt comfortable that I could, and I understood many of the underlying principles because .. well if you have access to a mainframe, you "see" the same elements in a bigger form. Access to a mainframe as a kid wasn't exactly normal, but if you count the number of mainframes in the UK in the 60s and 70s and multiply by 20-50 for the headcount who ran them and used them, its not zero. Across the same interval thousands of people came into ownership of a full blown computer, and I didn't, mostly by choice. I got an Acorn "atom" around the time the BBC micro was launched, secondhand from somebody upgrading. By then, I was close to graduating with a CS degree. The most fun I had was building an external PSU from scavanged parts. The Analogue bit!
CosmicShadow 4y ago
I'm firmly in the "home computer generation" and it's becoming more frustrating than ever. It's frustrating that everything is going/has gone mobile, because mobile sucks. It doesn't matter what form factor or how fast the phone is, it's just easier to get up and walk over to a computer and do it 100x faster and easier. (obviously if you aren't near a computer or use specific apps, this isn't always the case). The problem with how accessible "computing" is these days, which really means tablet and mobile, is that now everything has to be mobile first, which makes everything crappier and less configurable. It gives less power to the power user and we're the only ones who can see that loss. The market is so big now that few billion extra people actually regularly "compute" that of course every company will just keep digging down the rabbit hole to crappier and crappier experiences tailored for mobile only folks and no one will notice but us. I have a business that sells custom items with a live preview. It fits and works wonderfully on a computer. You can see the preview, the inputs, the helpboxes, dropdowns and everything. But now the entire world just surfs where the experience can't help but be gimped by the size of a phone and how it operates via touch and in embedded browsers half the time. It sucks because people struggle through a process that would be 100x easier & faster if they just opened it on a goddamn computer, but they'll spend 45 minutes fighting through it on a phone. Maybe they don't know any better, but I don't ever see a future where they will and that's sad and depressing. Technology is just getting worse. I can't even get an SD card slot in a phone any more and people don't care or understand why that's insane.
- kcexn 4y ago
  The mobile first trend is being pushed in large part by millions of people from developing nations coming online who have no access to a PC or PC like device.
  - CosmicShadow 4y ago
    I think that is probably a big part, but a bigger part is 90% of people in first world countries (who have money to pay and are valuable to advertisers) have never known how to use a computer (too complicated/scary) and now they all have one in their pockets they are addicted to. And since they never used computers they aren't as immune to being scammed, ripped off and fooled with fake dreams as us who lived through it all for years.
gexla 4y ago
> Being a digital native doesn't automatically mean you're computer savvy. I don't have time to properly dive into this, but adding "origin of digital native" to my todo list. I feel like digital native has always been about how people who grew up with certain devices use those devices differently than people who didn't grow up with them. People who grew up with desktops, might use mobile devices as if they were smaller desktops. People who grew up with mobile and use mobile as a primary device, might approach desktops as they would with mobile. Old habits die hard. I believed that digital native describes how someone might interact with interfaces, not about how they understand underlying tech. The term would also make more sense when applied to products. You want to know how different demographics use your products.
guender 4y ago
8bitsrule 4y ago
> The disappearance of OS and program configurability, for example, isn't something you notice or even think about if you're not coming from a place where everything once used to be configurable. I once became determined to repurpose one of the serial port chips in a Mac so that it sent and received at the 31.Kbps MIDI data rate. Doing that required a certain undocumented incantation with a magic value. I managed to deduce it thanks to an assembly program it took me a week to find in an old magazine. That value was sent to the chip from 'FreeBASIC' ... which could then, viola, send MIDI bytes out the port without needing external hardware. At the time I bitched a lot about that being made so hard to do. Little did I suspect.
pjerem 4y ago
Amazing reading ! It puts words on what I feel about technology industry and why I hate it a little more on every passing day. Big thanks to the author.
leftbit 4y ago
Growing up with home computers DID give you a different mindset about computers. Sooner or later you realize that you can make this machine do anything you want it do do. And it was quite simple to get started. No way you'll get this same mindset with modern smartphones.
codebolt 4y ago
Indeed, much of my current problem solving abilities were developed as a 10 year old trying to make DOS games work in the mid-to-late 90s. Most software dev and ops issues that I run into in my daily work are certainly no more difficult than the problems I had to deal with then, especially with all the info available online now.
diydsp 4y ago
Brilliant! This explains sooo much abt myself! And there's sooo much more about this to write... abt the letdown of requiring security in modern networked computers, the lack of trust! How this knowledge was built on IRL friendships... not just remote ones...
MarkusWandel 4y ago
90% or more of computer users during the "Home Computer Generation" (which to me is anchored around 1985, give or take a couple of years, and Commodore 64) were no more computer savvy than smartphone users are now. They wanted to play games. The computer had no OS to mess up. Loading up a game from disk did not require significant computer skills and if something went wrong, you just turned it off and back on and tried again. Maybe a tiny little bit of dabbling in BASIC along the lines of the print-over-and-over loop or a type-in program from a magazine. But computer savvy? Hardly. The main difference, as far as I am concerned: The <10% that were geeky enough to actually program these computers, or crack video games, or draw cool pictures using graphics software, whatever, that contributed something to the scene, had a ready mainstream audience. Lots of other people had the same machine and and were eager for new stuff to run on it. And things were simple enough that you could write an interesting-to-neurotypicals video game in BASIC in one day (in my case, a cute little platform jumper game that I saw on someone's VIC20, and even though we had much better ones on the C64, it just had this odd, primitive charm - so I made my own version). These days, the geeks do stuff that is largely only interesting to other geeks. Which is fine, the internet ensures that even this limited audience is huge. But the 90% that aren't geeks now aren't exposed to geek culture at all, not even as armchair dabblers or watchers. And use their magic pixel slates.
- jbd0 4y ago
  It's not this black and white. There's a whole spectrum of computer savviness of computer users during the "Home Computer Generation". I didn't learn programming during that time, but I learned all sorts of things about computers that lead to me eventually having a career as a software engineer. And I'm sure there were many who did create software/graphics/etc but didn't "contribute it to the scene".
empressplay 4y ago
aka Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
rmac 4y ago
is this the same thing that happened to MMORPG design? "The Home Computer Generation":"Computer Literacy"::"The Everquest Generation":"Gaming Literacy" Young gamers starting off in everquest had a hard time of it (just like the author states with getting things to work on computers), then we made everything easier e.g., finding groups, minimaps, pay-to-win" (as the author states with Steam), and now we have a generation of people who don't understand how things work...
makz 4y ago
Computing just for the sake of it. I miss that. But at the same time I ask myself: why? It looks pointless to me now. However, back then it didn’t look like that. It was amazing, it was fun, it was full of possibilities. Not anymore. It’s true that things have changed. But we have changed as well. Maybe it’s more because we changed than because technology changed.

170 points by stargrave 4y ago

What a whinge. > Being a digital native doesn't automatically mean you're computer savvy. What it actually means is that these generations operate at higher levels of abstraction. Even the "computer builders" of the past couple of decades merely snapped together lego bricks designed by others. And anyway, in the "old days" you spent at least as much time looking after your system as actually using it (I was shocked how my PC friends had disk optimizers and anti-virus and whatnot). But back then it was part of the fun, as it is for hams. But kids these days have too many important things to do than to become computer hams.

djaychela 4y ago
> What a whinge. Strong disagree here. >What it actually means is that these generations operate at higher levels of abstraction. That may be true, but I don't think it's necessarily a good thing. In the analogy of a car driver, if you don't know how the car works aside from driving it, then you are worse off in many respects. If it behaves oddly, you have no idea what is wrong, no idea how to fix it, and (in my experience) are a lot more likely to pay significantly more to do so. For many today, computers are a complete mystery - indeed I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid. They have become magical devices that seem beyond comprehension for many, and I think that's to the detriment of everyone. >And anyway, in the "old days" you spent at least as much time looking after your system as actually using it Also not true. Didn't spend -any- time looking after my ZX Spectrum. Just turned it on and either started writing software straight away, or loaded a game up. Maintenance was not a thing. >But kids these days have too many important things to do That has certainly not been my experience as a parent. They have lots of things to do, but I don't think much of it is important. It's just attention-grabbing.
- jmrm 4y ago
  >> But kids these days have too many important things to do > That has certainly not been my experience as a parent. They have lots of things to do, but I don't think much of it is important. It's just attention-grabbing. I think those "important things to do" means "extracurricular activities", that probably isn't so important to you or to me, but we know other parent that doesn't let their children have any time for themself due to those activities, they are. We're talking about learning a new language, learning to play some musical instrument, or even playing some sport in a local team. Both now and when I was a child I know and knew a lot of parent who stressed a lot, and stressed a lot their child, because they didn't sense them to advance in those activities and pressured them a lot to improve in that.
- danaris 4y ago
  > I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid. I think that's only true if that "proportionally" means "proportional to the number of people who have to work with computers on a daily basis". I don't know exactly when you were a kid, but from the ZX Spectrum comment, I'd guess it was in the early 1980s. I guarantee you more people, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to the total population, know concrete things about how computers work now than did then. Huge percentages of the population of the world had never even seen a computer when the ZX Spectrum was current. Computer Science curriculum (and related fields) was still, relatively speaking, in its infancy, and the number of institutions that even had anything that could be reasonably termed a functioning CS (or, again, related) department was fairly small. Today, yes, there are a lot of people who know very little about how computers work, even though nearly everyone (especially in the Western world) uses computers on a daily basis. There are even a lot of people with tech-related degrees who don't know the full ins and outs of how computers work even at a medium level of abstraction. But there are so many more people who have had the opportunity to learn about computers because of their ubiquity. There are so many more people who have, either through formal education or otherwise, learned how an operating system loads drivers, or how a file system manages space, or how a program allocates and frees memory, than in the early 1980s. I believe what you are seeing is the difference between a world where, when there was someone you could talk to about computers at all, they had to know how they worked in order to use them effectively, and a world where computers are so widespread everyone uses them, and so user-friendly that the vast majority of people never need to know or care how to do anything remotely like changing the jumpers on a SCSI drive or the dip switches on a sound card.
  - jarvist 4y ago
    I don't think this is true, at least in the UK. The BBC computer literacy project meant that there were BBC Model Bs in every UK school, with tie-in educational materials. In the early 90s my entire class at a run of the mill state primary school took turns pair-programming LOGO on the school's BBC Micro. I don't think you can get more ubiquitous than every single human having programmed a loop and subroutine.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  > my ZX Spectrum I'd hazard a guess OP meant early personal computers with something like Win 95, not underpowered microcontrollers.
  - technothrasher 4y ago
    By the time Win 95 rolled around, personal computers were well past the early stage, and the Z80 was neither underpowered nor a microcontroller. So I’m not sure what you’re saying, exactly.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      I'm saying that even an Arduino is faster than a ZX Spectrum, so yes I would place it firmly in that category as it wouldn't exactly be able to run anything advanced enough to warrant maintenance. > By the time Win 95 rolled around, personal computers were well past the early stage That's a matter of perspective really, in 100 years even what's modern today will be considered early.
- elzbardico 4y ago
  By the same token we could consider watching TV just a higher level of abstraction than being an amateur radio enthusiast. It would be technically correct while completely absurd in the real world.
- ghaff 4y ago
  With respect to cars though, they are more reliable and problems are almost certainly harder for them to fix on the road or in the home garage. It's probably useful to have some notion of how cars operate in general. But I suspect fewer and fewer have deep knowledge and certainly the ability/interest to do their own auto repairs of any consequence.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  > For many today, computers are a complete mystery - indeed I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid. They have become magical devices that seem beyond comprehension for many, and I think that's to the detriment of everyone. Yeah but did you understand how RAM chips worked? How processors worked? How registers and power supplies worked? Could you wire wrap a board? The previous generation of computer users knew how those things worked and often wired them up themselves. Most of these arguments are emotional. We, as computer practitioners, are dismayed that the general public doesn't value our knowledge. But should they? Are the kids who actually want to learn about computers not able to learn about them? I grew up fairly poor as a kid in the '80s-90s and most of my friends didn't have access to a computer at home. They learned the bare minimum they needed in the school library to finish homework assignments but otherwise didn't care. I was interested in computers and would go dumpster diving to find parts, but my friends didn't care. I'd say the cohort that had the money, time, and inclination to have computers as kids in the 1980s was much smaller than those who want to nowadays.
teddyh 4y ago
I mostly agree with you¹, however, it is a problem if the current computing environments does not actually allow people to do anything of their own. Just like 80’s computers had BASIC, there should be Flash-like authoring programs which people could write shareable programs on. But there aren’t! Specifically the sharing part, I mean. You can’t write a simple Poke the Penguin app and send it to your friend for fun anymore. You’re at the whims of enormous gatekeepers and censors. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106922#19113359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106922#19113359
- corrral 4y ago
  You can send Swift Playgrounds apps to other people over messages. To pick just one example, from what's often the main target of these "LOL these aren't real computers" sorts of complaints. If you're on a desktop, there are tons of ways, most more accessible than Back In My Day. I do think we lost something when Flash in particular died, but less apps/games (there are... a lot of very, very indie games made these days by solo hobbyists or enthusiasts, check places like itch.io, it's an overwhelming number) and more the independent animation scene, which was huge during the heyday of flash but seems mostly dead now.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  There's environments like Scratch, Jupyter notebooks, Minecraft, and even Roblox where kids definitely build experiences for each other. The problem is, standards have gotten a lot higher these days. When I was a kid, I fooled around and made RPGs that looked similar to the ones that my friends played on home consoles. Now a AAA game will be much more engaging than anything a kid can put together. These days it's become much simpler to put together attractive videos which is why so many kids want to become streamers. Buy a nice camera and a few lights and you can produce media that looked like movies I watched as a kid.
  - cmsj 4y ago
    > Now a AAA game will be much more engaging than anything a kid can put together. Two thoughts: 1) I kinda agree, and it's interesting how many of the founders of game studios who are now retiring, got their start on the 8/16bit home computers as teenagers making games that were the AAA titles of their day, because the upper bounds on game size/complexity were so low. 2) There has never been a better time for free tooling and instruction for kids who are interested in building games. Unreal Engine 5 and the thousands of hours of youtube tutorials for it, is quite a starting point to have. It puts the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit that I would have spent hours in, in the 90s, to complete shame!
eternityforest 4y ago
Things are mostly fine as they are(Aside from the rise of locked down, mandatory encrypted, cloud dependent stuff), but people definitely have lost some computer literacy. Not that they lost much that they couldn't google, even programming is easier than ever, the hard stuff is specialist work like OS and hardware design. It's not like we need average people to know ASM and C. But people do seem to have lost some of the interest. As I've said before, programming is easier than most other human activities, things like playing guitar or being a cashier are not only hard, they require skills that can't even be described fully. But programming/IT/etc still takes time to learn, and I do think people probably are somewhat fried from all the short form content and less interested in anything that has a slow and careful process.
- wvenable 4y ago
  Programming might be easy but software development is incredibly difficult. The average person will be hundreds of times more successful picking up a guitar or being a cashier than releasing a useful piece of software. Software development is incredibly difficult and a lot of people who are employed programmers aren't very good at it.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    Picking up a guitar might be easy; playing an instrument well is hard. They say it takes ten years; I'd say it takes about that long to be a good software developer. And like being a musician, most people bail out before they've learned. A few people stick with it and still don't get good (the management promotion route is this way!). Let's pass over the cashier thing; I was a cashier exactly once, on an exchange trip, so in a foreign language. I got the hang of it in about 20 minutes.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Writing stable, production-ready software is a grind. The personalities in software teams are often grumpy. I know many junior engineers who loved writing code and were dismayed at what went into writing production-grade software. Some of them moved to startups where the stakes were lower or they could work on MVPs, many transitioned into roles like PM or sales engineer, but a decent chunk just left software altogether. I love software so I won't leave but I know it's not for everyone.
incanus77 4y ago
I would disagree, that operating a computer or computerized system is not necessarily being computer savvy. That is what the author is trying to say. I have long felt that when you have experienced the lower or lowest levels of abstraction, even in archaic times, you develop an intuition about how a thing works or how a problem might be fixed, or how to properly scrutinize or be suspicious of a particular new form of tech (itself often implemented at these higher levels). One example would be diagnosing "bad internet" by evaluating the wifi signal strength & interference from similar channels, the cable/fiber modem basic functionality and firmware version, the cable quality and function, the networking card in the computer, the function of the software behind it, the browser behavior, caching, or getting "wedged" somehow, the DNS resolver or its cache, an OS bug... it goes on and on. The flip side of this is: everything is fricking multilayered and complicated! And it sucks! But that's unfortunately what we've got when you have so many layers involved. Disclaimer: I'm firmly in the demographic described in the article.
richardjdare 4y ago
When I upgraded from an Amstrad CPC to an Amiga in 1989, I gained access to a higher level of abstration, like you said. Unlike the Amstrad, the Amiga had a GUI and a proper command line. But unlike the information kiosk-esque devices of today, my Amiga let me navigate its layers of abstraction as I saw fit. These layers represented another dimension of usability. They were meant to be used and navigated. Today we commonly think of a new layer of abstraction as if it "saves us" from the scary stuff underneath. We pave over what's underneath and pretend we are still standing on the ground. (Web interfaces are a good example. If I want to make a custom web widget I have to make it using form elements. If I am making a new widget in a desktop GUI, I make it using the same drawing and event primitives that the built-in widgets use. My new widget then sits at the same level of abstraction as the built-in widgets, and the overall system is preserved.) Even modern desktops suck in this regard. Navigating the layers of abstraction is like being an archaeologist uncovering scenes of historical catastrophe in the folded and shattered strata of our systems.

forrestbrazeal 4y ago

A neighbor of mine, a professor at an excellent private college who teaches a stats class where the students are required to do a bit of programming, told me the other day that she's noticed a cycle in her students over the past few years. 15 years ago the students tended to come in knowing more about navigating their computers than she did; now, and especially in the last 4-5 years, she's increasingly having to teach them basic computer literacy in order to get to the learning they're actually supposed to be doing. This has contributed to my resolve not to let my son have an iPad, but he can have a laptop pretty much when he wants one.

radicalbyte 4y ago
I'm currently in the process of buying various old Commodore hardware (C64, A500, A1200) and investing in better tooling (just got an Oscilloscope) for this reason. My oldest son (8) and daughter (6) are both interested and at an age where I can introduce them to electronics and computing. When I was my son's age I was already building simple radio receivers (crystal + transistor) so they're old enough to start with these machines. Laptops will just get used for web games and youtube anyhow.
- robocat 4y ago
  Did you consider teaching them using something where the learning is more collaborative, where you are not an expert? Scratch, Roblox, etcetera. Part of the joy of learning the home computer was the feeling of being on the leading edge.
_fjb4 4y ago
I had a friend tell me recently that he had to teach a (high school) intern how to navigate the Windows taskbar and use the Control-C and Control-V shortcuts on the keyboard. I thought he was joking until he mentioned that the student mostly used mobile devices at home and school and rarely used a PC. Apparently schools nowadays are replacing their laptop fleets with iPads and all that.
- zozbot234 4y ago

Terr_ 4y ago

The flip-side of this decay in the richness of the experience is that things are more idiot-proofed for mass consumption. I believe that's the driving factor behind grandparents saying "kids these days are so good with the computers" etc. Older generations grew up with machines that you could actually ruin unless you read the manual, leading to hesitancy and trepidation with the new stuff. (Which often eschews documentation entirely.) In contrast, younger generations are more likely to assume (often correctly) that they are free to try randomly poking icons and twiddling dials until something looks promising. Seen from the outside--especially by that older generation--this confidence can be mistaken as expertise. (This is similar to how some people will consider you a magician if you open up a command-line prompt.)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ghostpepper 4y ago
You won't get very far poking randomly in a command prompt though - at least a few memorized spells are required to perform magic
- kfarr 4y ago
  You might be surprised much time kids have on their hands. Typing help on old school dos prompt gave some hints iirc. Somehow I found qbasic, maybe just listing some directory which started an endless rabbit hole of self learning for me.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > Somehow I found qbasic, maybe just listing some directory which started an endless rabbit hole of self learning for me. The qbasic IDE was incredibly intuitive, it's sad that we don't have something closely modeled on it today (or on Turbo Pascal/C++) as a default terminal-friendly dev experience. Equally disappointing that the most common window-based IDE is some sort of Electron- and JavaScript-based monstrosity.
- 4y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Reminds me of the Purdue Boilermakers. The Purdue University has as their mascot, the boilermaker. It always seems such a weird mascot for an engineering school. However, when they were founded, steam boilers were at the cutting edge of engineering. They were what powered railroads and steamships. And the high pressures and temperatures pushed the limits on metallurgy and reliability. There were many people killed because a boiler exploded. So at that time, "Boilermaker" suggested attention to detail, and broad technical knowledge. Now not so much. Every generation builds on the foundation laid before, and tries to achieve new things.

h2odragon 4y ago
Building and maintaining boilers is a highly regulated industry still; with the fairly reasonable justification that they can blow up big if you screw it up. Wonder if they still teach anything specific to that.

chaoticmass 4y ago

Being born in 1985 and having grown up with home computers, starting with the IBM PC jr and BASIC, through to a 386 with QBasic, and then a Pentium with Visual Basic, this essay resonates with me a lot. It's not just the actual knowledge I picked up which has served me well, but also gaining a general intuition about how computers work. Probably most important of all though is learning how to learn. It's this skill that I am sure I will rely on most over time as my esoteric knowledge becomes more and more irrelevant.

cmsj 4y ago
Yeah that intuition is invaluable. It's what makes us the family "computer guy/girl", and is why we can help someone who uses some piece of software every day, that we have never seen before, figure out how to do some thing they want to do. I try to tell people this, when I help them - I don't know everything about every piece of software, I just have a sense of what the operation they want to do will probably be like, and the confidence to poke around until I find it because I also have a sense of what is likely to be a destructive operation.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  Tech Support Cheat Sheet: https://xkcd.com/627/ https://xkcd.com/627/
  - nocman 4y ago
    As is often the case, the mouseover text on that XKCD just makes the comic!
mjevans 4y ago
Earlier versions of Windows and like programs used to be far more discoverable. Self documenting. The menu system could be intuitively accessed by a mouse, without learning anything specific. It was common for Alt + Underlined menu letter to Open that menu directly. Underlined letters IN the menu items would quick-select an item from that menu. Items that were expected to be commonly used, that had direct keyboard shortcuts, told the end user the shortcut. The design was simple, categorized, and discoverable. Self documenting end user education. Now we have ribbons... useless ribbons that make everything slower.

causality0 4y ago

more computer literate than the generations both preceding and, to the confusion of the aforementioned pundits, succeeding us. This is the most terrifying thing to me. I spent my early adulthood watching all my leisure activity interests like sci-fi, videogames, superheroes, the web, etc go far more mainstream than I could've imagined without bringing along the behaviors they fostered. How can someone spend five hours a day online without caring how it works? It's like being a professional chef without knowing what a farm is. I expected the youth of today to be technological wizards, not a bunch of trained monkeys.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
All humans are trained monkeys. Some of those monkeys are self-trained on technological wizardry. Why are you comparing hobbies to professional cooking? I'm glad I can cook without having to farm, and I'd expect most people to be glad they can browse the web without expert knowledge in HTTP.
- causality0 4y ago
  Yes, but you know what a farm is. You know that animals reproduce, that their infants grow by eating vegetable matter. I can't write HTML either, but I know that it's text which describes the content and layout of a web page. I have younger relatives who don't know what a file is. They don't comprehend that a document and a picture and a video and an audio track are all same sort of thing interpreted in a different way.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    Most people's (in the US's) mental image of a farm is probably way different from the likely-very-industrialized farms that are actually producing most of their food. Strikes me as fairly similar to the surface-level of understanding they have about "apps" and "operating systems" and "memory," actually.
    - wngr 4y ago

cmsj 4y ago

I enjoyed the nostalgia of this piece, but in general I suspect that the proportion of the population who are predisposed to be "computer nerds" as we were often known in the 80s/90s, is pretty much the same. While the systems themselves may not force those people to be confronted with the inner workings from the first flick of the power switch, the barrier of entry is so much lower now than it used to be, if you are interested in that stuff and want to try it. I was only able to buy an Amiga in 1990 because one of my grandmothers died and left me some money - £399 at the time, but adjusted for inflation that's £800. A suitably motivated person these days could choose to buy a Raspberry Pi for 5% of that and they'd just need a keyboard/mouse/tv which are easy to come by for little/no money. I don't think we should expect everyone to be computer literate, and I welcome the era of appliance computing for the utility it provides (although I do grumble when my OSes/devices lose features in the name of simplicity), but I do think we should try to expose more young people to "real" computing, so the ones who are predisposed to love it, can get that opportunity. For that reason I'm buying each of my kids a Pi for their 10th birthday - they get two SD cards, one with Raspbian and one with RetroPie and it's up to them which they boot during their screen time (or neither, if they would prefer to just watch TV or play xbox). I was hooked from day one of having a computer in the house, but I don't need them to be hooked too.

orev 4y ago
> I suspect that the proportion of the population who are predisposed to be "computer nerds" as we were often known in the 80s/90s, is pretty much the same. Possibly. But the fact that owning a PC essentially forced the exposure to happen undoubtedly caused more seeds to grow. It’s far too easy these days to never encounter that friction, and therefore people with latent skills simply go into something else (or worse, never find another passion).
Nextgrid 4y ago
I'm not sure about the barrier to entry. Sure, buying a computer is much cheaper, but the things you can do have been intentionally restricted - there's an entire industry thriving on artificial unefficiency - the sort of thing that computers were meant to obviate. Imagine a teenager wanting to search for & automatically "like" Facebook pages about their favorite band. Where would you even start, considering Facebook intentionally makes that difficult with fear-mongering about "security" and lays traps that will ban your account if they detect automated activity? Same with all the other mainstream services. It's much harder nowadays to make computers do anything "useful" when everything is intentionally siloed into proprietary apps & services that intentionally prevent interoperability. > For that reason I'm buying each of my kids a Pi for their 10th birthday I'd suggest getting them an older laptop with good Linux support - a dual-core/4GB RAM ThinkPad can be obtained for relatively cheap and has the advantage that it's still very similar to modern computers especially early on in the boot process (x86 as opposed to the Pi's ARM architecture) so any low-level skills they'd learn while breaking & fixing it would also apply to most computers out there.

themadturk 4y ago

I'm rather an oddity here...I came to microcomputers as a young adult, rather than as a kid, but I consider myself very much of the "home computer generation," and being part of it led to my career. Because of the time my children were born, they were very much inheritors of this. My eldest son grew up sitting in my lap, watching the Norton disk optimizer clean up my hard disk. He and his brother build their own gaming machines, etc. But reading this article, and some of the comments here, I wonder, isn't this what we were always working toward? Isn't it OK that we're reaching a point where computing devices are ubiquitous and nearly everyone can pick one up and make use of it? My kids are digital natives, but my wife didn't find computers useful until she got an iPad, and it's enriched her life greatly. She's not technical, never has been, and always avoided "complicated" computers. I think we've merely passed into a different era of computing. For some people it's not as fun, perhaps not as lucrative, but for many more people it's (arguably) more empowering and useful.

kcexn 4y ago
There's also an argument to be made about complexity. While the average home user in the past could with effort learn the ins and outs of a DOS system, there is no way the average home user would have the time, energy, or experience to learn the ins and outs of how Windows 10 it 11 even begins to work. The author briefly mentions that Arch Linux users are making an informed choice. But he fails to mention how few users, even amongst the hardcore Linux crowd use a base Arch build with no pre-built configurations. Most Linux users in the Arch community use Arch based distros like Manjaro. Getting a base Arch distro is fairly hardcore, you boot into an environment that has minimal drivers and is for all intents and purposes, is not functional. You then spend the next many hours configuring it to get a basic, kinda usable system. Followed by many weeks and months of tweaking to get it to a place where you might be happy to use it on a daily basis. This is because modern computing systems have hundreds or thousands of components that need to work together, most environments hide the integration of all of these parts to the user, because even the most sophisticated and educated users find it tedious to manually integrate all of that. And Arch is considered baby steps compared to say Gentoo or even Linux From Scratch. Which don't even try to hide operating system level details from the user like Arch does. Quickly if you play with either of those environments you will learn that modern general purpose computer operating systems are many orders of magnitude more complicated than 50 years ago. That's why they require teams of professionals to tune properly. There are whole businesses in enterprise computing (Redhat, SUSE, WindRiver) whose entire business revolves around helping customers tune their OS for production loads. This is entirely because OS's have become so overwhelmingly complex that most companies can't afford to keep in-house expertise. Now, there's an argument that maybe all of this complexity isn't necessary. But efforts to cut down on complexity has led us down the path of specialised computing, largely powered by hardware acceleration using FPGAs and ASICs, which is an entirely different beast to software. To summarise the rant: In pursuit of performance, and quality. We've made computing enormously complicated with massive barriers to entry. It would not be feasible for users to have to learn about the nitty gritty details of computing before being able to use their computers.

harrylepotter 4y ago

10 PRINT "FUCK" 20 GOTO 10 …still makes me giggle

jrm4 4y ago
Oh, in my intro IT classes I do a whole thing about 10 PRINT "John is AWESOME 20 GOTO 10 ..and little 10 year old me discovering how to BE GOD BY HARNESSING THE POWER OF INFINITY in your computer.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  At around 12 years (having learned some extremely basic Q-BASIC from a book, no computer at home to test it on) I co-wrote a scareware with a friend from school on their family computer. It would fake formatting your computer. We knew about GOTO, but not about loops (or faking them with GOTO). So we copy and pasted the same line 100 times and edited the number in every line :D Good times ;)
agiacalone 4y ago
I got in trouble for doing this very thing in middle school on an Apple ][. :D

ggm 4y ago

Everyone likes to consider themselves exceptional. For a long time, I used to say "oh, this passed me by because I had access to a mainframe (smirk)" but I now realise I was in the cohort, and just made other life choices. The fact I had access to a mainframe had nothing to do with it. At best? it was post-hoc reasoning. I certainly knew people who assembled their own from kits, one who made their own from 74xx series logic and discrete parts, many who bought. I didn't do any of these things but I felt comfortable that I could, and I understood many of the underlying principles because .. well if you have access to a mainframe, you "see" the same elements in a bigger form. Access to a mainframe as a kid wasn't exactly normal, but if you count the number of mainframes in the UK in the 60s and 70s and multiply by 20-50 for the headcount who ran them and used them, its not zero. Across the same interval thousands of people came into ownership of a full blown computer, and I didn't, mostly by choice. I got an Acorn "atom" around the time the BBC micro was launched, secondhand from somebody upgrading. By then, I was close to graduating with a CS degree. The most fun I had was building an external PSU from scavanged parts. The Analogue bit!

CosmicShadow 4y ago

I'm firmly in the "home computer generation" and it's becoming more frustrating than ever. It's frustrating that everything is going/has gone mobile, because mobile sucks. It doesn't matter what form factor or how fast the phone is, it's just easier to get up and walk over to a computer and do it 100x faster and easier. (obviously if you aren't near a computer or use specific apps, this isn't always the case). The problem with how accessible "computing" is these days, which really means tablet and mobile, is that now everything has to be mobile first, which makes everything crappier and less configurable. It gives less power to the power user and we're the only ones who can see that loss. The market is so big now that few billion extra people actually regularly "compute" that of course every company will just keep digging down the rabbit hole to crappier and crappier experiences tailored for mobile only folks and no one will notice but us. I have a business that sells custom items with a live preview. It fits and works wonderfully on a computer. You can see the preview, the inputs, the helpboxes, dropdowns and everything. But now the entire world just surfs where the experience can't help but be gimped by the size of a phone and how it operates via touch and in embedded browsers half the time. It sucks because people struggle through a process that would be 100x easier & faster if they just opened it on a goddamn computer, but they'll spend 45 minutes fighting through it on a phone. Maybe they don't know any better, but I don't ever see a future where they will and that's sad and depressing. Technology is just getting worse. I can't even get an SD card slot in a phone any more and people don't care or understand why that's insane.

kcexn 4y ago
The mobile first trend is being pushed in large part by millions of people from developing nations coming online who have no access to a PC or PC like device.
- CosmicShadow 4y ago
  I think that is probably a big part, but a bigger part is 90% of people in first world countries (who have money to pay and are valuable to advertisers) have never known how to use a computer (too complicated/scary) and now they all have one in their pockets they are addicted to. And since they never used computers they aren't as immune to being scammed, ripped off and fooled with fake dreams as us who lived through it all for years.

gexla 4y ago

> Being a digital native doesn't automatically mean you're computer savvy. I don't have time to properly dive into this, but adding "origin of digital native" to my todo list. I feel like digital native has always been about how people who grew up with certain devices use those devices differently than people who didn't grow up with them. People who grew up with desktops, might use mobile devices as if they were smaller desktops. People who grew up with mobile and use mobile as a primary device, might approach desktops as they would with mobile. Old habits die hard. I believed that digital native describes how someone might interact with interfaces, not about how they understand underlying tech. The term would also make more sense when applied to products. You want to know how different demographics use your products.

guender 4y ago

8bitsrule 4y ago

> The disappearance of OS and program configurability, for example, isn't something you notice or even think about if you're not coming from a place where everything once used to be configurable. I once became determined to repurpose one of the serial port chips in a Mac so that it sent and received at the 31.Kbps MIDI data rate. Doing that required a certain undocumented incantation with a magic value. I managed to deduce it thanks to an assembly program it took me a week to find in an old magazine. That value was sent to the chip from 'FreeBASIC' ... which could then, viola, send MIDI bytes out the port without needing external hardware. At the time I bitched a lot about that being made so hard to do. Little did I suspect.

pjerem 4y ago

Amazing reading ! It puts words on what I feel about technology industry and why I hate it a little more on every passing day. Big thanks to the author.

leftbit 4y ago

Growing up with home computers DID give you a different mindset about computers. Sooner or later you realize that you can make this machine do anything you want it do do. And it was quite simple to get started. No way you'll get this same mindset with modern smartphones.

codebolt 4y ago

Indeed, much of my current problem solving abilities were developed as a 10 year old trying to make DOS games work in the mid-to-late 90s. Most software dev and ops issues that I run into in my daily work are certainly no more difficult than the problems I had to deal with then, especially with all the info available online now.

diydsp 4y ago

Brilliant! This explains sooo much abt myself! And there's sooo much more about this to write... abt the letdown of requiring security in modern networked computers, the lack of trust! How this knowledge was built on IRL friendships... not just remote ones...

MarkusWandel 4y ago

90% or more of computer users during the "Home Computer Generation" (which to me is anchored around 1985, give or take a couple of years, and Commodore 64) were no more computer savvy than smartphone users are now. They wanted to play games. The computer had no OS to mess up. Loading up a game from disk did not require significant computer skills and if something went wrong, you just turned it off and back on and tried again. Maybe a tiny little bit of dabbling in BASIC along the lines of the print-over-and-over loop or a type-in program from a magazine. But computer savvy? Hardly. The main difference, as far as I am concerned: The <10% that were geeky enough to actually program these computers, or crack video games, or draw cool pictures using graphics software, whatever, that contributed something to the scene, had a ready mainstream audience. Lots of other people had the same machine and and were eager for new stuff to run on it. And things were simple enough that you could write an interesting-to-neurotypicals video game in BASIC in one day (in my case, a cute little platform jumper game that I saw on someone's VIC20, and even though we had much better ones on the C64, it just had this odd, primitive charm - so I made my own version). These days, the geeks do stuff that is largely only interesting to other geeks. Which is fine, the internet ensures that even this limited audience is huge. But the 90% that aren't geeks now aren't exposed to geek culture at all, not even as armchair dabblers or watchers. And use their magic pixel slates.

jbd0 4y ago
It's not this black and white. There's a whole spectrum of computer savviness of computer users during the "Home Computer Generation". I didn't learn programming during that time, but I learned all sorts of things about computers that lead to me eventually having a career as a software engineer. And I'm sure there were many who did create software/graphics/etc but didn't "contribute it to the scene".

empressplay 4y ago

aka Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

rmac 4y ago

is this the same thing that happened to MMORPG design? "The Home Computer Generation":"Computer Literacy"::"The Everquest Generation":"Gaming Literacy" Young gamers starting off in everquest had a hard time of it (just like the author states with getting things to work on computers), then we made everything easier e.g., finding groups, minimaps, pay-to-win" (as the author states with Steam), and now we have a generation of people who don't understand how things work...

makz 4y ago

Computing just for the sake of it. I miss that. But at the same time I ask myself: why? It looks pointless to me now. However, back then it didn’t look like that. It was amazing, it was fun, it was full of possibilities. Not anymore. It’s true that things have changed. But we have changed as well. Maybe it’s more because we changed than because technology changed.