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If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. The gener

If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. The general public didn't really start to adopt personal computers en masse until the 90s. And if you look at, for example, conversations between David Letterman and Bill Gates regarding the internet in the 1995 (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tgODUgHeT5Y https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tgODUgHeT5Y), and Gates tries to explain to him the advantage of it and David pans that he doesn't get it, with the audience laughing along to dismissive jokes about it being unnecessary complexity versus radio and cassette tapes. That was the prevailing attitude regarding computers even well into the 90s (now, they're pervasive).

Kon-Peki 4y ago
> If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer. And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better. David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did. That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)

Kon-Peki 4y ago

> If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer. And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better. David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did. That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)