I first got interested in computers and eventually programming by playing with custom ROMs for my Windows Mobile phone when I was in college, circa 2006. If it wasn't for smartphones, I never would have taken a networking class (I was a radio/TV major) and realized I was very interested in what I could make a computer do (I'm a software engineer now).
I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past.
https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals
Glorious.
Sure, most kids who had an Amiga didn't get that deeply into it, e.g. a friend of mine who also had an Amiga never seems to use his computer for much more than playing games and watching movies to this day. But for anyone interested to dive deeper, the doors were wide open and and as encouraging and honest to newbies as humanly possible. Even my non-technical kid friends knew how to load up a neat module in protracker. None of that focus on quality and openness for the sake of quality and doing the right thing was to the detriment of the "casuals", and a polar opposite of a world of stuff like miniminzed JS that does nothing interesting, smartphone apps that half-ass what a website could do, games that just rehash and dumb down the same shit to keep people consuming.
The shift from tools and variety to mere consuming and fads is rather crass, come to think about it.
True. But most people never took the TV to the toilet with them. Yes, It's the same type of person. But today there's no norms to discourage usage (e.g., most people didn't watch TV at work) and thus ever less self-regulation.
Note: I'm not longing for the good ol' days. Just wanting to add some clarity to the comparison.
Well, that would have avoided those everybody-flushing-during-breaks troubles said to have existed in TV's golden days ...
I see my kid today, he is absolutely hooked to videogames. Minecraft and Fornite, they are already richer in variety than all of the games of my childhood combined!
He does some stuff on scratch and loves it so I tried python with the super simple 2d game engines... This has been a repeated failure. He has 0 patience left to try out stuff, learn the syntax or tinker with it.
But I understand, it is really easy to get instant satisfaction from the baked in stuff, oh look a new challenge to do on fornite!
I still got into programming as a kid & have been doing it for a living since I was 18. And I had plenty of friends (most!) who just wanted to play the games, as well as those that got into programming to make their own.
I’m curious about people who learned to program as children. I was an intensely curious kid too, and would quite happily dig around the Windows 3.1 OS hoping to uncover something cool. All I really got out of it was a knowledge of the computer’s file system, though.
In my early teens I had access to the internet, and managed to find a C++ tutorial online. I learned to print text to the command line, but not much more than that.
It took until my late 20s that I finally had the resources and mental stamina to start learning it for real.
We also had Logo classes at primary school but I never "got" that you can actually program with logo, it seemed like a silly drawing program to me at the time.
The first is that those old systems were so limited you could either write BASIC or machine code. There were no distractions, no other apps, and no social media - except paper magazines. So 100% of your computer time was devoted to typing in code, learning about code, or writing your own code.
The other reason is that in the UK at least, a lot of one-man-shops produced an entire games industry around the Sinclair (Timex) Z81, Spectrum, and other 8-bits of the day.
The business had all of the magic characteristics of an open market: minimal cost of entry, minimal cost of marketing (through cheap ads in paper magazines), low-cost distribution, and an enthusiastic and largely untapped potential customer base.
No platform today has those characteristics. Web "apps" probably come closest, which is why we're talking about this on HN. But a lot of 8-bit businesses and careers were started without the corporate and financial cruft that surrounds modern start-ups.
Coding on the machines themselves was more of an indie kind of thing.
Plenty of stories about it on the Retro Gaming Magazine.
Most of my friends back on the 8 bit days never learned to code anything beyond LOAD "", as they had plenty of games to choose from at the local bootleg shop.
I can't cite the correct reference, but it's something along the lines that when the masses do more of one thing than the other, something will suffer bad.
Smartphones are for consumers of information. Computers are (were?) for creation of information.
I had to recompile the programs to hard code the security dongles key into it.
We do not have that capability with the iDevices. Nor do we really have it with workstation devices (except of course Linux). Manufacturers don't consider it important to breed a generation of users who can be developers with little more than the initial shipment of software - instead the base has been split, such that more profit can be gained, and more control over an elite market, can be applied.
Developers are the tip of the spear for OS vendors. There is a great deal of control over this end of things, for no reason other than to make it possible to have a separated distinction between developer and user. I believe this distinction is having a net deleterious effect on computing ..
TV is non-interactive, smartphones allow a great deal of interactivity.
Besides, I don't think watching a fair amount of TV is a bad thing in the first place. It's a creative medium, you're consuming art (okay, maybe a lot of it isn't very good, but it's art nonetheless).
I think you might just be nostalgic.
Yes, a lot of people watched too much TV, but at least they had the capability of doing things like image editing, building spreadsheets, etc. Smartphones can do those things, but it's so awkward that it's more likely that you're not going to bother, so you're more likely to just consume content instead of create it if you don't own a desktop or a laptop.
Personally, I'm not really nostalgic over traditional computers, but I am a little nostalgic for stuff created by hand instead of filled in with a template.
That's an interesting word choice and something tells me "productivity" is highly subjective.
For example, can you code on a smartphone? Yeah, but not as productively as on a desktop.
Can I manage my sales team's day to day from my smart phone? Absolutely and that might be a great choice as managing sales probably doesn't lend to being in one place for very long.
Definition of “creative” seems narrow here.
Mobile devices do have some negative consequences, sure, but they also enable engagement, contribution, self improvement and creativity. My kids watch a lot of YouTube, but also use their iPads to do homework and sketch and draw.
These are fantastic tools. How we use them is up to us.