I wonder what it's like for those born after 1990 or so. Is the opportunity for this type of magic still available? How do the younger generations develop our level of love and passion for computing without these experiences?
I don't think this will ever change. Creativity will always find a way out whether that is building in Minecraft or writing Minecraft mods in Java. Sure, it's a bit more "luxurious" with a computer at home or even a personal device and JavaScript rather than BASIC but at the end of the day nothing fundamental has changed.
Totally! The landscape was/is definitely different since there have been so many abstraction layers placed on top of the hardware, but even web programming is a fun first experience that creates that “woah I made that happen??” feeling.
Personally my first real exposure to programming was playing with Atmel microcontrollers after watching some youtube tutorials and writing video game cheats after seeing a friend use one and wondering how the heck it worked. There was a lot of stuff to figure out, but each time you conquer some new detail of the overall system you’re immediately hungry for more.
It’s actually assuring to hear folks older than myself ask these questions, because I find myself looking at the increasingly locked down computing tech of today and wonder new folks are going to get into this wonderful hobby if there’s no ability to mess around with it.
On the simpler side, plenty of my friends got started in the early 2000's with Texas Instruments graphing calculator Basic. I'm glad to see the ticalc.org scene is still alive, but recall that the really magical stuff was almost always intimidatingly written in assembly!
Edit: ...And perhaps not surprisingly, I went to ticalc.org to see that TI is locking down their ecosystem as well and removing native code execution. Obviously today's world has more out there for learning and tinkering despite all these walled gardens, but the flipside is that each microcosm is relative obscure compared to the past when there were a handful of mainstream ways to learn to hack and each was just as welcoming or intimidating as the other.
"z2, we are very disappointed in your behavior, and there needs to be a consequence. So I'm afraid you really leave us no choice...YOU ARE GOING TO GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY WITH YOUR FRIENDS!"
Yeah, I was similar. Reading comic books or other geeky pursuits, and my Dad asking me to go outside and play catch with him. :)
We’d just hired a new guy after his masters. I guess I am older than him by say 5 years.
I grew up on command line dos, hacking around on config.sys and similar to reconfigure the “extended memory” (above 640 kB) to get say, Tie fighter to run with gouraud shading and stereo sound, little tasks like that kept me burrowed into manuals and using the dos shell as a kid, just before the Win 3.1 era. After becoming a teenager I ended up not touching a computer for maybe 10 years, so the dos shell was always this thing I hacked around on as a kid.
Fast forward to seven years ago, and our new hire has never seen the dos shell (cmnd prompt/whatever) So I am explaining how to navigate, commands to issue etc. and it’s the weirdest thing, reaching into my childhood to tell this guy about some work related particulars here and now. It kind of did feel like he missed out on something good. Then again he was probably hacking together a website at similar age and wonders what in the world we did growing up a few years before.
The fact that I think you're a philistine going with Gourad over Phong shading is something totally incomprehensible to that person that came five years after you.
I feel like my relationship to computers vs. newer generation is very much like my parent generations relationships with cars vs my own. My father in law can tell me about every car he's owned, upgrades made to it, etc. Similarly, I can recall every PC I've built, as well as all of the incremental upgrades along the way.
At this point in my career, I've directly managed close to 100 different software engineers, and only a handful are terribly interested in the inner workings of the machines they use. For them, they're tools, some better than others, for doing the job.
Had a programming class in high school in which the teacher gave us a lot of free time to work on whatever interested us. I made dozens of games in Java during that time, mostly pretty simple ones, but by senior year I had written a sort-of advanced ray casting engine (Think Wolfenstein 3D but with textured floors and a fully-rendered ceiling layer) and I worked with two of my friends to develop it into a sci-fi RPG that we entered into a Game Development competition.
There was a definite moment in high school where I realized that I liked programming, and not just making games with it, and decided that I'd study computer science at university.
I don't think my experience is typical for my demographic, however.