4 ms·

I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed pub

I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with. The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab and an unusually open minded computer teacher. If you demonstrated that you were dependable, he'd basically let you do whatever you want. While my school was mostly a Mac shop, I was a bit of a Microsoft shill in high school so by graduation I'd figured out how to stand up and run a Windows NT file & web server for our school newspaper. Another guy was a Linux nut and had been allowed to do something similar with RedHat for the school's drafting lab. Inclination met opportunity, one thing led to another, and I went on to work with technology for the next 25 years of my life. What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down. It must be a very rare school today that allows the kind of freedom we had. There is no IDE preinstalled on a phone, and even merely installing an "unapproved" app is under fire. If for no other reason, for the sake of the kids the industry, the tools, the operating systems need to be more open. They need to be tinkerable. That's how the most motivated kids tend to learn. Our best and brightest are not being made because we've closed things down to maximize some hedge fund's ROI somewhere. The financialization of America was a grave error.

stavros 4mo ago
But making tools tinkerable is incompatible with extracting maximal value from them!
RiverCrochet 4mo ago
A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.
- anthk 4mo ago
  Windows XP (since SP2? )came with a C# compiler and it was pretty much ignored, CSC.exe. A bit less with Perl and Python under *nixes where the Idle was about two clicks away. With C# you would get far more performance and much better support.
alterom 4mo ago
>I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. >The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s >The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab So, you essentially own your career to your parents being well-off and tech inclined. It's not like you ended up in that high school by accident. Sure, being born in such a family is a stroke of luck that many people don't get to have. I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at home, and went to a great high school in Odesa, and later, in Brooklyn when we immigrated. Like @susam, I played Digger on IBM PC 286 as my first game when I was 4. I have a PhD in math and Google/Meta/MS on my resume today. I owe this to many strokes of luck, but how tinkerable the PCs were was not the most significant one by far. The most important part was access to production tech, seeing it used, and having a role model that made it a natural consideration as a career choice. And the "luck" of what was available in my K12 was 100% the work of my parents who got me into those schools. Credit where credit is due, dude.
- youngNed 4mo ago
  Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this guy in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class decontruction.
  - alterom 4mo ago
    >Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this guy in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class decontruction. Not sure what you're talking about, and who needs to be put in their place, and why you'd want an Indian to chime in, but OK. My point was that when it comes to careet, the parent commentor owes a lot more to their parents than strokes of luck and how tinkerable computers were back in the day. They did attribute their success to luck though, instead of going for the usual self-made-man myth, so I don't know what place they need to be put in either.
- elektronika 4mo ago
  Americans like to downplay the impact of the situation of their birth in their successes and others' failures.
c22 4mo ago
> ...an unusually open minded computer teacher. I've heard this story several times before and I, myself, had an unusually open minded computer teacher as a youth. I'm beginning to suspect this attribute is is not so unusual amongst computer teachers as has been assumed.
- irishcoffee 4mo ago
  I learned absolutely nothing from my AP compSci teacher in highschool, java was taught at the time, I missed the c++ version by a year. He was awful. I learned nothing.
sunshinesnacks 4mo ago
> What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down Raspberry Pi is a nice exception. I know there are other good examples, but it was the first thing I thought of…
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  Raspberry Pi has a proprietary boot process and GPU.
  - sunshinesnacks 4mo ago
    True. But in terms of kids being able to explore computers, I think it’s a pretty good platform. What’s a better alternative?

stavros 4mo ago

But making tools tinkerable is incompatible with extracting maximal value from them!

RiverCrochet 4mo ago

A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.

anthk 4mo ago
Windows XP (since SP2? )came with a C# compiler and it was pretty much ignored, CSC.exe. A bit less with Perl and Python under *nixes where the Idle was about two clicks away. With C# you would get far more performance and much better support.

alterom 4mo ago

>I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. >The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s >The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab So, you essentially own your career to your parents being well-off and tech inclined. It's not like you ended up in that high school by accident. Sure, being born in such a family is a stroke of luck that many people don't get to have. I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at home, and went to a great high school in Odesa, and later, in Brooklyn when we immigrated. Like @susam, I played Digger on IBM PC 286 as my first game when I was 4. I have a PhD in math and Google/Meta/MS on my resume today. I owe this to many strokes of luck, but how tinkerable the PCs were was not the most significant one by far. The most important part was access to production tech, seeing it used, and having a role model that made it a natural consideration as a career choice. And the "luck" of what was available in my K12 was 100% the work of my parents who got me into those schools. Credit where credit is due, dude.

youngNed 4mo ago
Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this guy in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class decontruction.
- alterom 4mo ago
  >Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this guy in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class decontruction. Not sure what you're talking about, and who needs to be put in their place, and why you'd want an Indian to chime in, but OK. My point was that when it comes to careet, the parent commentor owes a lot more to their parents than strokes of luck and how tinkerable computers were back in the day. They did attribute their success to luck though, instead of going for the usual self-made-man myth, so I don't know what place they need to be put in either.
elektronika 4mo ago
Americans like to downplay the impact of the situation of their birth in their successes and others' failures.

c22 4mo ago

> ...an unusually open minded computer teacher. I've heard this story several times before and I, myself, had an unusually open minded computer teacher as a youth. I'm beginning to suspect this attribute is is not so unusual amongst computer teachers as has been assumed.

irishcoffee 4mo ago
I learned absolutely nothing from my AP compSci teacher in highschool, java was taught at the time, I missed the c++ version by a year. He was awful. I learned nothing.

sunshinesnacks 4mo ago

> What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down Raspberry Pi is a nice exception. I know there are other good examples, but it was the first thing I thought of…

chadgpt3 4mo ago
Raspberry Pi has a proprietary boot process and GPU.
- sunshinesnacks 4mo ago
  True. But in terms of kids being able to explore computers, I think it’s a pretty good platform. What’s a better alternative?