If you wanted a video game forum, you needed to host it. You had to learn how Linux servers worked, what MySQL was and how tables and migrations functioned, and might even need to write a little PHP on the side.
When I was a teenager, I had a PHP website that did game matchmaking, lightweight article publishing, and custom (non-phpBB) forums. I put this under Subversion source control and let several of the members that were code literate contribute. We built a lot of stuff and had a whole thing going. Multiple websites. And then we stood up an IRC server, which gave way to bots and log ingestion and archival.
We ran a MediaWiki instance (http://strategywiki.org), we knew the folks that wrote the Gamecube LAN adapter tunnel.
When it came time for college, I was way ahead of the curve. I blew through all of the upper level courses before my electives, and I was a TA in my freshman year. (Second semester!) This let me take a lot more biology and chemistry classes (something I wasn't previously skilled with, but had a deep interest in learning).
This isn't as widespread anymore since there are platforms that do everything. Even though the learning curve has dropped and the barrier to entry is lower than ever, the barriers of interest and necessity have been raised.
Kids don't need to hack around as much, and it's sad.
InvisionFree started in 2002 and was incredibly, bonkers-popular.
* Do programmers still fool around with Cobol or Assembly or Fortran? Not so much
* How important is C nowadays? Yes - everything runs on it - but that is because for the most part it is rock solid, and we need fewer and fewer C developers
* The set of "primitives" required has moved up a layer of abstraction. New skills include: website builders, data pipelines, infra-as-code, cloud infra, web frameworks, etc.
If people are still hacking the same way as they were 20 and 30 years ago, that is a problem. Yes, the hacking today surely looks different than it did decades ago - the primitives are larger and higher leverage - but there is hacking all the same.
A higher percentage of kids that were on the internet had the skills you are talking about, but they weren't a higher percentage of the overall population.
For example, there might have been 5% of young teens doing what you were doing, and that might have made up half of the internet users... now, it is still 5% of the total population, but that is now only 1/18th of the total internet population of that age range.
I happened to run my own phpbb/vbulletin forums as a kid and I can confidently say I was the only kid even close to doing that in my high school. I also didn't need to know anything to do it except press buttons on CPanel and phpmyadmin, things I didn't really understand. And I was scared to tell other guys at school about this stuff because I'd be an instant loser. Even in uni I rarely met anyone with those interests.
Meanwhile, these days, it's completely cool to spin up your own Discord server for your friends. It's totally mainstream to be into that sort of thing. Even gaming is cool now. And there's more kids these days doing more of what the grandparent post glamorizes because it's more accessible than ever.
I'd be surprised if grandparent commenter was even working off any real experience with modern kids and instead just wanted to glamorize their own nostalgia. I mean, surely modern kids aren't as cool as he was.
Then there is the entire linus tech tips make a cool RGB flashy gamer computer and poke at shit, where those kind of tech youtubers make get a million views per video.
Or buy a rasberry pi at 13 and poke at linux on the internet.
You have to realize, that even back then, only %0.5 of a school population is going to be into computers enough to install linux on anything. At my small high school, I was the only one basically.
Surely.
I don't get why you folks have to be so rude. It diminishes your argument. I was with you until you had to poke fun at me. I'm a human being capable of making mistakes and reevaluating my ground truths. Why be like that?
> patting themselves on the back
While there's a lot of nostalgia in my anecdote, it's mostly spurred on by my dislike of platformization and centralization. I think they produce many negative externalities.
But thanks, now I'll clam up and stop talking about my personal experience.
I think it's something that would be helpful to think about when I'm raising my kids.
I took a 2 week typing class in the summer after 8th grade. We learned on big heavy mechanical typewriters where you really had to hammer the key to get an impression. It was time well spent, as it has paid off for me continuously ever since. For example, I wrote this entirely with touch typing (not looking at the keyboard).
Your medium of expression also influences the speed of your thought. You'll notice that people who speak for a living seem to be wittier than those who don't; they're able to form thoughts and translate them into expression very quickly. Typing/writing is already much slower than speaking, but its advantage is the ability to revise a thought before conveying it. If you're typing slowly, you're probably forming thoughts slower than someone who types quickly. Anecdotally, spending so much of my time communicating via keyboard stunted the development of my ability to express vocally, because it lowered the rate at which I had to generate and, internally revise, and expel thoughts. It would be even worse if I could not touch type.
That's my layman's take, anyway.
The touchscreens of today make touch typing impossible.
Also, with my laptop and its cramped, wretched keyboard, I use a full size bluetooth one (they are surprisingly hard to find) to touchtype on. I hate how every keyboard maker has to "innovate" by moving all the non-Qwerty keys around randomly.
I'm wondering if you have very specific muscle memory outputs for your fingers vs. an intuition of where each key is relative to each other. E.g., I'm typing this sentence with only my pointer and middle finger on my right hand. Would that cause a problem for you?
But all of this goes just as much when a lack of typing skills is the constant bottleneck. If you can't type at the speed of thought, the quality and complexity of your thoughts suffer since a part of your working memory is consumed by the process of typing. This has real implications for what you're able to accomplish.