I don’t see anything that could be considered a “Youth bad” statement in that comment. It’s a complex issue, influenced by a myriad of factors.
For example, I could dissasemle and reassemble my first PC without any prior knowledge. I had to learn to use DOS to navigate the OS and get things done. I got a book from the library about it, and spent hours upon hours just learning about how the file structure, commands, programs, external media, etc. worked before I could do anything remotely useful.
Today a PC/tablet/phone is a black box, you have to actively WANT to tinker in order to learn such about how they work. And most big tech companies try to punish you for so much as trying to replace a battery yourself.
I suspect you are projecting some personal feelings onto a stranger’s comment.
They aren’t just a black box, tinkering with them actually has negative consequences. On Android getting root access results in Safetynet attestation failing and on iOS you can’t even get root at all unless you are happy to run some bins from questionable sources. Things are very different for youths. As someone else stated to tinker in the way you mentioned means getting an Arduino or some kind of tinker-friendly SBC.
I’m really confused by your reasoning here. You’re describing how it was extremely difficult to you and you had to go to great lengths to learn technology. Not everyone did this back then not does everyone do it now.
That was the stuff you needed to do to do things like: play video games on your computer, get online and chat with people, hell even use your PC to write an essay and print it out (or even setup your printer to begin with). You didn’t necessarily have to go as far as they described to do that stuff, but you had to do some of it.
Nowadays there’s no equivalent. You don’t have to at least kinda understand the filesystem to play minecraft on your iPad.
I think you’re missing my point. I’m not saying everyone capable of using a computer today is equivalent to that level of dedication and curiosity. I’m just saying that in the same way only a handful of people do that today only a handful of people pursued it in the past. It’s become easier to use computers, but hat doesn’t mean there still aren’t people who learn the ins and outs of them today like people had to do in the past to use them.
I think you missed my point, which is that everyone who used a computer back then (less of the overall population) had to at least dip their toes in learning how they worked back then. This meant that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten interested in computers found out that they really liked them and started going down the rabbit hole on their own from there.
People would get a computer for school, buy a game for it, and have to learn how to fix the computer when the game didn’t work. Hell, in the 80s (as a 90’s kid I missed the boat on this one) there were magazines that included games where you had to type the code for the game (in BASIC) into the computer yourself for the game to run. Many of those magazine games had bugs so if you wanted to fix it you had to learn some basic coding skills to spot the bug/typo in the magazine.
Nowadays such entryways into the computing hobby are far less ubiquitous, you have to seek them out. I’m not saying people now are less capable or less curious or that the hardcore nerds won’t still get into the hobby, I’m saying it used to be required for playing PC games or social interactions online. There used to be incentives for people who otherwise wouldn’t have tried to figure out how computers worked, and as a result a lot of people who didn’t necessarily think of themselves as would-be computer people ended up getting into computers.
I totally agree, but nobody is saying everyone that uses a computer is a tech wiz. I’m saying there are still plenty of people today interested in digging in deeper just like there were back then. Tech being more accessible today hasn’t led to a decrease in such things, because the people the ease brought in wouldn’t have dug in in the past.
I really think it has led to a reduction in the rate at which otherwise average people wind up in tech because they like it, as opposed to for money.
In other words, the computing hobby has declined from its heyday in the 80’s-early 00s. Most people who build their own PC now can do so with about 10 minutes of help from YouTube and tools like PCPartsPicker, which helps a lot with accessibility, but the trade off is that the people who get into computers now don’t need to spend as much time on them to get into them. They don’t need to build up as much foundational knowledge, so now that knowledge has become rarer, even within e.g. the indie PC gaming hobby.
You can literally make an entire video game without writing any code. This is phenomenal if you want to make games easily, but it also gives coding a level of inaccessibility even in the minds of people getting into making video games that didn’t use to exist because they came as a package deal.
But plenty of people still do learn the deeper stuff. Just because you can write a game without code doesn’t mean everyone who makes games is doing it without code.
I don’t see anything that could be considered a “Youth bad” statement in that comment. It’s a complex issue, influenced by a myriad of factors.
For example, I could dissasemle and reassemble my first PC without any prior knowledge. I had to learn to use DOS to navigate the OS and get things done. I got a book from the library about it, and spent hours upon hours just learning about how the file structure, commands, programs, external media, etc. worked before I could do anything remotely useful.
Today a PC/tablet/phone is a black box, you have to actively WANT to tinker in order to learn such about how they work. And most big tech companies try to punish you for so much as trying to replace a battery yourself.
I suspect you are projecting some personal feelings onto a stranger’s comment.
They aren’t just a black box, tinkering with them actually has negative consequences. On Android getting root access results in Safetynet attestation failing and on iOS you can’t even get root at all unless you are happy to run some bins from questionable sources. Things are very different for youths. As someone else stated to tinker in the way you mentioned means getting an Arduino or some kind of tinker-friendly SBC.
I’m really confused by your reasoning here. You’re describing how it was extremely difficult to you and you had to go to great lengths to learn technology. Not everyone did this back then not does everyone do it now.
That was the stuff you needed to do to do things like: play video games on your computer, get online and chat with people, hell even use your PC to write an essay and print it out (or even setup your printer to begin with). You didn’t necessarily have to go as far as they described to do that stuff, but you had to do some of it.
Nowadays there’s no equivalent. You don’t have to at least kinda understand the filesystem to play minecraft on your iPad.
I think you’re missing my point. I’m not saying everyone capable of using a computer today is equivalent to that level of dedication and curiosity. I’m just saying that in the same way only a handful of people do that today only a handful of people pursued it in the past. It’s become easier to use computers, but hat doesn’t mean there still aren’t people who learn the ins and outs of them today like people had to do in the past to use them.
I think you missed my point, which is that everyone who used a computer back then (less of the overall population) had to at least dip their toes in learning how they worked back then. This meant that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten interested in computers found out that they really liked them and started going down the rabbit hole on their own from there.
People would get a computer for school, buy a game for it, and have to learn how to fix the computer when the game didn’t work. Hell, in the 80s (as a 90’s kid I missed the boat on this one) there were magazines that included games where you had to type the code for the game (in BASIC) into the computer yourself for the game to run. Many of those magazine games had bugs so if you wanted to fix it you had to learn some basic coding skills to spot the bug/typo in the magazine.
Nowadays such entryways into the computing hobby are far less ubiquitous, you have to seek them out. I’m not saying people now are less capable or less curious or that the hardcore nerds won’t still get into the hobby, I’m saying it used to be required for playing PC games or social interactions online. There used to be incentives for people who otherwise wouldn’t have tried to figure out how computers worked, and as a result a lot of people who didn’t necessarily think of themselves as would-be computer people ended up getting into computers.
I totally agree, but nobody is saying everyone that uses a computer is a tech wiz. I’m saying there are still plenty of people today interested in digging in deeper just like there were back then. Tech being more accessible today hasn’t led to a decrease in such things, because the people the ease brought in wouldn’t have dug in in the past.
I really think it has led to a reduction in the rate at which otherwise average people wind up in tech because they like it, as opposed to for money.
In other words, the computing hobby has declined from its heyday in the 80’s-early 00s. Most people who build their own PC now can do so with about 10 minutes of help from YouTube and tools like PCPartsPicker, which helps a lot with accessibility, but the trade off is that the people who get into computers now don’t need to spend as much time on them to get into them. They don’t need to build up as much foundational knowledge, so now that knowledge has become rarer, even within e.g. the indie PC gaming hobby.
You can literally make an entire video game without writing any code. This is phenomenal if you want to make games easily, but it also gives coding a level of inaccessibility even in the minds of people getting into making video games that didn’t use to exist because they came as a package deal.
But plenty of people still do learn the deeper stuff. Just because you can write a game without code doesn’t mean everyone who makes games is doing it without code.