The UK risks excluding the best developers on social class grounds
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I don't think just giving computers and internet connections would be sufficient - modern computers are rubbish. The generation of kids who grew up with Spectrums and C64s and Amstrad CPCs learned programming because they were presented with a screen like this:
http://www.retroisle.com/amstrad/cpc/Articles/cpc6128.png
That little flashing prompt which promised effectively unlimited potential. You just needed to type the right thing and you could do ANYTHING.
Especially for kids from poor backgrounds, the revelation that you can, by yourself, create anything you can imagine is just huge.
Windows and and Mac computers don't have that. I mean, it's there - I can open a Terminal window on my Mac and type 'irb' and start writing Ruby, but it's not obvious. It's not RIGHT THERE, staring you in the face, daring you to use it.
I think the Raspberry Pi - http://www.raspberrypi.org/ - project might be the solution. It's incredibly cheap, it plugs into your TV (which was why the Spectrum was a huge success at the low end of the home computer market, because unlike the technically better BBC/Acorn or Amstrad machines, it didn't need a dedicated monitor), and it runs Linux.
Yes, it'll boot into a GUI and not that teasing little flashing prompt, but BECAUSE it's a non-standard OS on a non-standard CPU platform - and because it's so cheap and easy to rest if you mess it up - it'll encourage fiddling and exploring and that is what we need to get the next generation of hackers.
This is something I feel really strongly about. It's so easy to dismiss kids from shit backgrounds as worthless neds/chavs, but for every knuckle-dragging thug there's another kid with a spark of potential. I know how easily I could've been a knuckle-dragger instead of the computer geek I turned out to be.