3 ms·

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 ofte

by 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.

by cmsj 4y ago

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.