3 ms·
[...] when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes [...] Doesn't anecdotal evidence suggest that children quickly exceed their mentors (parents) wh
by daveloyall 12y ago
[...] when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes [...]
Doesn't anecdotal evidence suggest that children quickly exceed their mentors (parents) when exposed to 1980s consumer hardware? (That hardware was deterministic--same key sequence means same result every time. You know, like video games from the same era.)
Being exceeded by your child can be a dramatic emotional event. Are the feelings that a father or mother experience different when the child is a little girl vs. a little boy?
</speculation>
- cortesoft 12y agoI am pretty sure all computer hardware is deterministic? (unless we are talking about quantum computers?)
- daveloyall 12y agoThe deterministic nature of computer hardware used to be apparent during interaction with the computer. Novices would quickly learn to carry out common actions 'blind'. You could memorize a sequence of keystrokes and experiment with changing parts, or leaving out parts, to develop variations, or shorter but equivalent sequences. The user interfaces of older computers were also orders of magnitude faster. If you were to time travel back to the 1980s and try to show off a smart phone to 8-bit hobbyists, I predict that they'd frequently attempt to remove the battery: "It seems to be stuck in a loop!" Some might blame multi-threading, some might blame storage and communication latency... I blame planned obsolescence and the 'Halloween Documents' come to mind. Most users were not introduced to real computers. They were introduced to products, products engineered to optimize for profitability.