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Comment by imjustsaying | Hacker News Reader

>Slowly the idea of running your own software on your own devices is becoing arcane.

Ever since I've been using computers (late 90's onward), my experience has been that running your own software has always been arcane. I can count on one hand people I've known in the flesh who've done this. Peoples' eyes get wide as if you're about to empty their bank account with your mind if you tell them you wrote a script or a program to do even the simplest of things.

Joe and Jane Phonetypical of today wouldn't have been the proprietary software-creating types of yesterday, they would've been the AOL, Microsoft Word and solitaire-using types.

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In my mind I included software of your own free choosing. As in, not only what’s in the app-store of your device, but that software the kid down the street hacked together for you.

But yeah, I see your point. Of course my memory is somewhat clouded by the circle of people I choose to surround me with.

(Edit: But even the 90s has started the downward slope. There was a time before that, and in first half when systems booted into a BASIC-interpreter)

An interesting case to exemplify: Minecraft started out as java application. You downloaded a set of jar-files an ran. The software was proprietary, but it was yours to run, and java being what it is, was fairly simple to modify and extend. A large community of tinkeres and hackers grew up around this capability of modding the software in various ways.

Then commoditization happens, Microsoft bought it, rewrite it in c++ and started selling it as a service with an app-store. Modding is still part of the echosystem, but the barrier to entry is sufficiently high that I have hard time imagine any new generations of hackers growing up as Minecraft modders.

Ah I was wondering how Minecraft got so big (I also always thought it was just an open-source thing). Microsoft seems to be really good at hand-holding the masses and sitting them in front of things they didn't know they would've liked.

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