[HN Gopher] The Home Computer Generation
___________________________________________________________________
The Home Computer Generation
Author : stargrave
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-07-19 04:21 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datagubbe.se)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Reminds me of the Purdue Boilermakers.
|
| The Purdue University has as their mascot, the boilermaker.
|
| It always seems such a weird mascot for an engineering school.
|
| However, when they were founded, steam boilers were at the
| cutting edge of engineering. They were what powered railroads and
| steamships. And the high pressures and temperatures pushed the
| limits on metallurgy and reliability. There were many people
| killed because a boiler exploded.
|
| So at that time, "Boilermaker" suggested attention to detail, and
| broad technical knowledge.
|
| Now not so much.
|
| Every generation builds on the foundation laid before, and tries
| to achieve new things.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Building and maintaining boilers is a highly regulated industry
| still; with the fairly reasonable justification that they can
| blow up big if you screw it up. Wonder if they still teach
| anything specific to that.
| chaoticmass wrote:
| Being born in 1985 and having grown up with home computers,
| starting with the IBM PC jr and BASIC, through to a 386 with
| QBasic, and then a Pentium with Visual Basic, this essay
| resonates with me a lot.
|
| It's not just the actual knowledge I picked up which has served
| me well, but also gaining a general intuition about how computers
| work. Probably most important of all though is learning how to
| learn. It's this skill that I am sure I will rely on most over
| time as my esoteric knowledge becomes more and more irrelevant.
| cmsj wrote:
| Yeah that intuition is invaluable. It's what makes us the
| family "computer guy/girl", and is why we can help someone who
| uses some piece of software every day, that we have never seen
| before, figure out how to do some thing they want to do.
|
| I try to tell people this, when I help them - I don't know
| everything about every piece of software, I just have a sense
| of what the operation they want to do will probably be like,
| and the confidence to poke around until I find it because I
| also have a sense of what is likely to be a destructive
| operation.
| cmsj wrote:
| 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 - PS399 at the time, but
| adjusted for inflation that 's PS800. 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.
| themadturk wrote:
| I'm rather an oddity here...I came to microcomputers as a young
| adult, rather than as a kid, but I consider myself very much of
| the "home computer generation," and being part of it led to my
| career. Because of the time my children were born, they were very
| much inheritors of this. My eldest son grew up sitting in my lap,
| watching the Norton disk optimizer clean up my hard disk. He and
| his brother build their own gaming machines, etc.
|
| But reading this article, and some of the comments here, I
| wonder, _isn 't this what we were always working toward?_ Isn't
| it OK that we're reaching a point where computing devices are
| ubiquitous and nearly everyone can pick one up and make use of
| it? My kids are digital natives, but my wife didn't find
| computers useful until she got an iPad, and it's enriched her
| life greatly. She's not technical, never has been, and always
| avoided "complicated" computers.
|
| I think we've merely passed into a different era of computing.
| For some people it's not as fun, perhaps not as lucrative, but
| for many more people it's (arguably) more empowering and useful.
| qsort wrote:
| I think the drift many people have is that the essence of what
| a computer _is_ , - exactly the only (up to trivial
| differences) machine that can be arbitrarily programmed - is
| being obfuscated by devices that make it easy to consume and
| hard to produce, an asymmetry that doesn't need to exist.
|
| A few months ago I read on HN this analogy, which I found very
| apt: it's like there's no space in the modern computing world
| for a computer-literate "middle class". You're either not
| interested in computers at all and you're fine with a tablet or
| a chromebook, or you need to know so much stuff about computers
| that you might as well make a career out of it.
|
| Sent from my iPhone, how ironic.
| forrestbrazeal wrote:
| A neighbor of mine, a professor at an excellent private college
| who teaches a stats class where the students are required to do a
| bit of programming, told me the other day that she's noticed a
| cycle in her students over the past few years.
|
| 15 years ago the students tended to come in knowing more about
| navigating their computers than she did; now, and especially in
| the last 4-5 years, she's increasingly having to teach them basic
| computer literacy in order to get to the learning they're
| actually supposed to be doing.
|
| This has contributed to my resolve not to let my son have an
| iPad, but he can have a laptop pretty much when he wants one.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I'm currently in the process of buying various old Commodore
| hardware (C64, A500, A1200) and investing in better tooling
| (just got an Oscilloscope) for this reason.
|
| My oldest son (8) and daughter (6) are both interested and at
| an age where I can introduce them to electronics and computing.
| When I was my son's age I was already building simple radio
| receivers (crystal + transistor) so they're old enough to start
| with these machines.
|
| Laptops will just get used for web games and youtube anyhow.
| robocat wrote:
| Did you consider teaching them using something where the
| learning is more collaborative, where you are not an expert?
| Scratch, Roblox, etcetera.
|
| Part of the joy of learning the home computer was the feeling
| of being on the leading edge.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| I had a friend tell me recently that he had to teach a (high
| school) intern how to navigate the Windows taskbar and use the
| Control-C and Control-V shortcuts on the keyboard. I thought he
| was joking until he mentioned that the student mostly used
| mobile devices at home and school and rarely used a PC.
| Apparently schools nowadays are replacing their laptop fleets
| with iPads and all that.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Maybe that just means that programming tools need to evolve to
| meet the expectations of the post-home-computer generations.
|
| I'm not sure it's a good idea to require future generations to
| do things the way we did, e.g. by using a laptop rather than an
| iPad. I'm not a parent as you are, but I am an uncle. When I
| was a child, my favorite uncle was a home computer hobbyist,
| and he taught me a lot of what he knew about programming,
| particularly in Applesoft BASIC on the Apple II family. When I
| first became an uncle, I was looking forward to doing for the
| next generation what my uncle did for me. But the relationship
| between him and me was a special thing that will not happen
| again. He started using home computers as an adult hobbyist at
| around the same time I was born, and my parents probably bought
| our Apple IIGS based at least in part on his recommendation.
| Now, there's a wide gap between the way I'm used to using
| computers and the way that the kids are using them. I think my
| nieces and nephew, if they have any interest at all in
| programming, will be better off learning it from someone other
| than me. And of course, there are so many online resources
| these days; they don't have to have an in-person teacher for
| this at all.
| causality0 wrote:
| _more computer literate than the generations both preceding and,
| to the confusion of the aforementioned pundits, succeeding us._
|
| This is the most terrifying thing to me. I spent my early
| adulthood watching all my leisure activity interests like sci-fi,
| videogames, superheroes, the web, etc go far more mainstream than
| I could've imagined without bringing along the behaviors they
| fostered. How can someone spend five hours a day online without
| caring how it works? It's like being a professional chef without
| knowing what a farm is. I expected the youth of today to be
| technological wizards, not a bunch of trained monkeys.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The mobile- and social-centric Web is the new TV. Do you care
| how your TV works? Most people aren't using it for anything
| important, they've got no reason to care.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| How many pieces of civil infrastructure, bridges, roads,
| walkways, gutters, buildings, etc do you use but not
| understand? Life is very complicated and most people only
| bother understanding the parts that they care about. It may be
| software for you, but it isn't for everyone.
| q-big wrote:
| > How many pieces of civil infrastructure, bridges, roads,
| walkways, gutters, buildings, etc do you use but not
| understand?
|
| The question rather was:
|
| > How can someone spend five hours a day online without
| caring how it works?
|
| Thus: How many pieces of civil infrastructure, bridges,
| roads, walkways, gutters, buildings, etc that you use would
| you _love_ to understand if you had sufficient times for
| learning?
|
| Answer: Nearly all of them.
| causality0 wrote:
| Exactly. I'm not a civil engineer but I know a concrete
| bridge is composed of hardened slurry and that its shape
| transmits the weight of objects on it into its columns or
| to its anchored ends. The level of ignorance we're
| approaching is like kids not knowing why they only drive on
| one side of the road and someone saying "that's ok because
| the car won't let them cross over the center line".
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Answer: Nearly all of them.
|
| For you maybe, but I don't think most people even care.
| Despite many Americans spending hours driving for their
| commutes, I don't think most even understand what goes into
| classifying the difference between an arterial, a state
| highway, and an Interstate. Despite many Tokyo residents
| using a myriad of trains to get around, most have only a
| dim understanding of how their rail system works.
|
| But they can care about other things and that's fine. Maybe
| they're passionate about making art, writing books, or
| cooking food.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| All humans are trained monkeys. Some of those monkeys are self-
| trained on technological wizardry.
|
| Why are you comparing _hobbies_ to _professional_ cooking? I 'm
| glad I can cook without having to farm, and I'd expect most
| people to be glad they can browse the web without expert
| knowledge in HTTP.
| causality0 wrote:
| Yes, but you know what a farm is. You know that animals
| reproduce, that their infants grow by eating vegetable
| matter. I can't write HTML either, but I know that it's text
| which describes the content and layout of a web page. I have
| younger relatives who don't know _what a file is_. They don
| 't comprehend that a document and a picture and a video and
| an audio track are all same sort of thing interpreted in a
| different way.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The flip-side of this decay in the richness of the experience is
| that things are more idiot-proofed for mass consumption.
|
| I believe that's the driving factor behind grandparents saying
| "kids these days are so good with the computers" etc. Older
| generations grew up with machines that you could actually ruin
| unless you read the manual, leading to hesitancy and trepidation
| with the new stuff. (Which often eschews documentation entirely.)
|
| In contrast, younger generations are more likely to assume (often
| correctly) that they are free to try randomly poking icons and
| twiddling dials until something looks promising. Seen from the
| outside--especially by that older generation--this confidence can
| be mistaken as expertise.
|
| (This is similar to how some people will consider you a magician
| if you open up a command-line prompt.)
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Great-grandparents pretty soon. Early GenX (say late 1960's
| births) and younger grew up with Pong and VCRs and know how to
| "run the machine."
| ghostpepper wrote:
| You won't get very far poking randomly in a command prompt
| though - at least a few memorized spells are required to
| perform magic
| kfarr wrote:
| You might be surprised much time kids have on their hands.
| Typing help on old school dos prompt gave some hints iirc.
| Somehow I found qbasic, maybe just listing some directory
| which started an endless rabbit hole of self learning for me.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Somehow I found qbasic, maybe just listing some directory
| which started an endless rabbit hole of self learning for
| me.
|
| The qbasic IDE was incredibly intuitive, it's sad that we
| don't have something closely modeled on it today (or on
| Turbo Pascal/C++) as a default terminal-friendly dev
| experience. Equally disappointing that the most common
| window-based IDE is some sort of Electron- and JavaScript-
| based monstrosity.
| [deleted]
| causality0 wrote:
| _The flip-side of this decay in the richness of the experience
| is that things are more idiot-proofed for mass consumption._
|
| I liked the internet a lot more when the idiots couldn't use
| it.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| That is a disturbingly elitist attitude. For some of these
| so-called "idiots", the Internet is their only way of
| connecting with communities that may not exist locally.
| Think, for instance, of a person who went blind late in life,
| who can connect with other such people even though they're in
| the middle of nowhere, thanks to the Internet. We shouldn't
| require such people to master arcane computer stuff as well.
| As someone who has developed software catering to this exact
| group of people, I have indeed been annoyed at their lack of
| proficiency sometimes, but I'm glad I could help them get
| connected.
| gumby wrote:
| What a whinge.
|
| > Being a digital native doesn't automatically mean you're
| computer savvy.
|
| What it actually means is that these generations operate at
| higher levels of abstraction. Even the "computer builders" of the
| past couple of decades merely snapped together lego bricks
| designed by others.
|
| And anyway, in the "old days" you spent at least as much time
| _looking after_ your system as actually _using_ it (I was shocked
| how my PC friends had disk optimizers and anti-virus and
| whatnot). But back then it was part of the fun, as it is for
| hams.
|
| But kids these days have too many important things to do than to
| become computer hams.
| teddyh wrote:
| I mostly agree with you1, _however_ , it is a problem if the
| current computing environments does not actually allow people
| to do anything of their own. Just like 80's computers had
| BASIC, there _should_ be Flash-like authoring programs which
| people could write shareable programs on. But there aren't!
| Specifically the sharing part, I mean. You _can't_ write a
| simple _Poke the Penguin_ app and send it to your friend for
| fun anymore. You're at the whims of enormous gatekeepers and
| censors.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106922#19113359
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| There's environments like Scratch, Jupyter notebooks,
| Minecraft, and even Roblox where kids definitely build
| experiences for each other. The problem is, standards have
| gotten a lot higher these days. When I was a kid, I fooled
| around and made RPGs that looked similar to the ones that my
| friends played on home consoles. Now a AAA game will be much
| more engaging than anything a kid can put together.
|
| These days it's become much simpler to put together
| attractive videos which is why so many kids want to become
| streamers. Buy a nice camera and a few lights and you can
| produce media that looked like movies I watched as a kid.
| cmsj wrote:
| > Now a AAA game will be much more engaging than anything a
| kid can put together.
|
| Two thoughts:
|
| 1) I kinda agree, and it's interesting how many of the
| founders of game studios who are now retiring, got their
| start on the 8/16bit home computers as teenagers making
| games that were the AAA titles of their day, because the
| upper bounds on game size/complexity were so low.
|
| 2) There has never been a better time for free tooling and
| instruction for kids who are interested in building games.
| Unreal Engine 5 and the thousands of hours of youtube
| tutorials for it, is quite a starting point to have. It
| puts the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit that I would have
| spent hours in, in the 90s, to complete shame!
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 1. Yup, they also had the advantage of being able to
| learn as the industry grew. They were at the forefront of
| the industry, developing the first 3D rendering
| pipelines, creating the first textures, scenes, etc.
| Nowadays it's a lot more knowledge to absorb. I feel the
| same way about networking. I think any young field is
| like this. There must have been a time when making
| bicycles or cars was like this too, when real progress
| was made through incremental experimentation.
|
| 2. 100%. I mean, I know many in my cohort who got
| interested in graphics programming by playing with Gary's
| Mod. There's still plenty of ways to make games or
| programs for friends. I'm still convinced that the kids
| (with stable/solvent home lives) interested in
| programming and making a computer do their bidding are
| supremely capable. I mean today learning a bit of
| Javascript is all you need to get started on the web.
| corrral wrote:
| You can send Swift Playgrounds apps to other people over
| messages. To pick just one example, from what's often the
| main target of these "LOL these aren't real computers" sorts
| of complaints. If you're on a desktop, there are tons of
| ways, most more accessible than Back In My Day.
|
| I do think we lost something when Flash _in particular_ died,
| but less apps /games (there are... a _lot_ of very, very
| indie games made these days by solo hobbyists or enthusiasts,
| check places like itch.io, it 's an _overwhelming_ number)
| and more the independent animation scene, which was _huge_
| during the heyday of flash but seems mostly dead now.
| incanus77 wrote:
| I would disagree, that operating a computer or computerized
| system is not necessarily being computer savvy. That is what
| the author is trying to say.
|
| I have long felt that when you have experienced the lower or
| lowest levels of abstraction, even in archaic times, you
| develop an intuition about how a thing works or how a problem
| might be fixed, or how to properly scrutinize or be suspicious
| of a particular new form of tech (itself often implemented at
| these higher levels).
|
| One example would be diagnosing "bad internet" by evaluating
| the wifi signal strength & interference from similar channels,
| the cable/fiber modem basic functionality and firmware version,
| the cable quality and function, the networking card in the
| computer, the function of the software behind it, the browser
| behavior, caching, or getting "wedged" somehow, the DNS
| resolver or its cache, an OS bug... it goes on and on.
|
| The flip side of this is: everything is fricking multilayered
| and complicated! And it sucks! But that's unfortunately what
| we've got when you have so many layers involved.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm firmly in the demographic described in the
| article.
| djaychela wrote:
| > What a whinge.
|
| Strong disagree here.
|
| >What it actually means is that these generations operate at
| higher levels of abstraction. That may be true, but I don't
| think it's necessarily a good thing. In the analogy of a car
| driver, if you don't know how the car works aside from driving
| it, then you are worse off in many respects. If it behaves
| oddly, you have no idea what is wrong, no idea how to fix it,
| and (in my experience) are a lot more likely to pay
| significantly more to do so.
|
| For many today, computers are a complete mystery - indeed I'd
| hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing
| concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid.
| They have become magical devices that seem beyond comprehension
| for many, and I think that's to the detriment of everyone.
|
| >And anyway, in the "old days" you spent at least as much time
| looking after your system as actually using it
|
| Also not true. Didn't spend -any- time looking after my ZX
| Spectrum. Just turned it on and either started writing software
| straight away, or loaded a game up. Maintenance was not a
| thing.
|
| >But kids these days have too many important things to do
|
| That has certainly not been my experience as a parent. They
| have lots of things to do, but I don't think much of it is
| important. It's just attention-grabbing.
| elzbardico wrote:
| By the same token we could consider watching TV just a higher
| level of abstraction than being an amateur radio enthusiast.
| It would be technically correct while completely absurd in
| the real world.
| jmrm wrote:
| >> But kids these days have too many important things to do
|
| > That has certainly not been my experience as a parent. They
| have lots of things to do, but I don't think much of it is
| important. It's just attention-grabbing.
|
| I think those "important things to do" means "extracurricular
| activities", that probably isn't so important to you or to
| me, but we know other parent that doesn't let their children
| have any time for themself due to those activities, they are.
|
| We're talking about learning a new language, learning to play
| some musical instrument, or even playing some sport in a
| local team. Both now and when I was a child I know and knew a
| lot of parent who stressed a lot, and stressed a lot their
| child, because they didn't sense them to advance in those
| activities and pressured them a lot to improve in that.
| ghaff wrote:
| With respect to cars though, they are more reliable and
| problems are almost certainly harder for them to fix on the
| road or in the home garage.
|
| It's probably useful to have some notion of how cars operate
| in general. But I suspect fewer and fewer have deep knowledge
| and certainly the ability/interest to do their own auto
| repairs of any consequence.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > my ZX Spectrum
|
| I'd hazard a guess OP meant early personal computers with
| something like Win 95, not underpowered microcontrollers.
| technothrasher wrote:
| By the time Win 95 rolled around, personal computers were
| well past the early stage, and the Z80 was neither
| underpowered nor a microcontroller. So I'm not sure what
| you're saying, exactly.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > For many today, computers are a complete mystery - indeed
| I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing
| concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid.
| They have become magical devices that seem beyond
| comprehension for many, and I think that's to the detriment
| of everyone.
|
| Yeah but did you understand how RAM chips worked? How
| processors worked? How registers and power supplies worked?
| Could you wire wrap a board? The previous generation of
| computer users knew how those things worked and often wired
| them up themselves.
|
| Most of these arguments are emotional. We, as computer
| practitioners, are dismayed that the general public doesn't
| value our knowledge. But should they? Are the kids who
| actually _want_ to learn about computers not able to learn
| about them?
|
| I grew up fairly poor as a kid in the '80s-90s and most of my
| friends didn't have access to a computer at home. They
| learned the bare minimum they needed in the school library to
| finish homework assignments but otherwise didn't care. I was
| interested in computers and would go dumpster diving to find
| parts, but my friends didn't care. I'd say the cohort that
| had the money, time, and inclination to have computers as
| kids in the 1980s was much smaller than those who want to
| nowadays.
| danaris wrote:
| > I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know
| nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was
| a kid.
|
| I think that's only true if that "proportionally" means
| "proportional to the number of people who have to work with
| computers on a daily basis".
|
| I don't know exactly when you were a kid, but from the ZX
| Spectrum comment, I'd guess it was in the early 1980s. I
| _guarantee_ you more people, both in absolute numbers and in
| proportion to the total population, know concrete things
| about how computers work now than did then. Huge percentages
| of the population of the world had never even _seen_ a
| computer when the ZX Spectrum was current. Computer Science
| curriculum (and related fields) was still, relatively
| speaking, in its infancy, and the number of institutions that
| even had anything that could be reasonably termed a
| functioning CS (or, again, related) department was fairly
| small.
|
| Today, yes, there are a _lot_ of people who know very little
| about how computers work, even though nearly everyone
| (especially in the Western world) uses computers on a daily
| basis. There are even a lot of people with tech-related
| degrees who don 't know the full ins and outs of how
| computers work even at a medium level of abstraction.
|
| But there are _so many more_ people who have had the
| opportunity to learn about computers because of their
| ubiquity. There are _so many more_ people who have, either
| through formal education or otherwise, learned how an
| operating system loads drivers, or how a file system manages
| space, or how a program allocates and frees memory, than in
| the early 1980s.
|
| I believe what you are seeing is the difference between a
| world where, when there was someone you could talk to about
| computers _at all_ , they _had_ to know how they worked in
| order to use them effectively, and a world where computers
| are so widespread everyone uses them, and so user-friendly
| that the vast majority of people never need to know or care
| how to do anything remotely like changing the jumpers on a
| SCSI drive or the dip switches on a sound card.
| jarvist wrote:
| I don't think this is true, at least in the UK. The BBC
| computer literacy project meant that there were BBC Model
| Bs in every UK school, with tie-in educational materials.
| In the early 90s my entire class at a run of the mill state
| primary school took turns pair-programming LOGO on the
| school's BBC Micro. I don't think you can get more
| ubiquitous than every single human having programmed a loop
| and subroutine.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Things are mostly fine as they are(Aside from the rise of
| locked down, mandatory encrypted, cloud dependent stuff), but
| people definitely have lost some computer literacy.
|
| Not that they lost much that they couldn't google, even
| programming is easier than ever, the hard stuff is specialist
| work like OS and hardware design. It's not like we need average
| people to know ASM and C.
|
| But people do seem to have lost some of the interest. As I've
| said before, programming is easier than most other human
| activities, things like playing guitar or being a cashier are
| not only hard, they require skills that can't even be described
| fully.
|
| But programming/IT/etc still takes time to learn, and I do
| think people probably are somewhat fried from all the short
| form content and less interested in anything that has a slow
| and careful process.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Writing stable, production-ready software is a grind. The
| personalities in software teams are often grumpy. I know many
| junior engineers who loved writing code and were dismayed at
| what went into writing production-grade software. Some of
| them moved to startups where the stakes were lower or they
| could work on MVPs, many transitioned into roles like PM or
| sales engineer, but a decent chunk just left software
| altogether. I love software so I won't leave but I know it's
| not for everyone.
| wvenable wrote:
| Programming might be easy but software development is
| incredibly difficult. The average person will be hundreds of
| times more successful picking up a guitar or being a cashier
| than releasing a useful piece of software.
|
| Software development is incredibly difficult and a lot of
| people who are employed programmers aren't very good at it.
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