I started coding on vintage Atari and Commodore PCs, where the first thing you saw after powering up your machine was a flashing cursor ready to accept basic co

I started coding on vintage Atari and Commodore PCs, where the first thing you saw after powering up your machine was a flashing cursor ready to accept basic code. The whole machine was an open slate, and it was easy to drop into assembly and call into the system directly. Making coding this easy and this immediate was definitely an incentive to start hacking around and experimenting. Javascript + HTML hacking now is almost as easy but being able to hack the same hardware all your friends use as their main computing platform was cool. Now that mobile is becoming more and more the primary, if not only, way people interact with computers, the hackability of mobile platforms does matter.