There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation".

When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC and so on.

[1] yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.

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arbuge 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For us in the same age cohort in Europe it was ZX Spectrums and Amstrad CPCs, besides the C64 which made it there too. Fun times.

	▲	_0ffh 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yup, I remember early school. Two guys in class had a computer, one was a ZX81 the other (me) a C64. We're still friends! =)

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II2II 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.

Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?

Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.

I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).

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aa-jv 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those of us who grew up with computers are truly a special breed, since we had to know how things work in order to do anything at all with the things.

These days kids are served eyeball-bleeding chaos on the supercomputers in their pocket, which they need permission to do anything else with .. and its kind of sad.

Learn what a byte is, kids. Learn where it fits into a register and why. Learn a few opcodes, some peripheral I/O heuristics. Break out that raspberry Pi and go full bare metal for a month.

I sure wish our mobile phones had compilers onboard. This is the one thing that is ruining computing for kids these days, imho. They need corporation-controlled permission, for fucks sake.

	▲	raddan 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I 100% agree with you, but as a person who came up in the tail end of the generation we’re discussing (we bought a bargain bin TI-99/4a at K-Mart) and also a faculty member who has been teaching young people how to program for the last ten years, I can tell you that the overwhelming response they have to your exhortation is “WHY?” The current crop of computer users is basically everybody, and the current crop of CS students has primarily been motivated by well-paying jobs [1]. So really, if you want to get through to them, you have to motivate why they should care about bits and bytes in the first place. Astonishingly, the Jobsian “bicycle for the mind” idea failed. Almost nobody now buys a computer to scratch an itch. They buy a computer (smartphone) to keep in touch with friends and family and to sometimes play games. The idea that software is a service that you pay for has been totally normalized. I find that it takes an entire semester of “imagine if!” scenarios before students start to catch on that WOW THIS IS AN AMAZING MACHINE! Some of them never get it. By analogy it’s like being upset at somebody in the 1970’s for blithely using their telephone without even stopping to consider what a fucking miracle the modern telephone system was. They would just stare at you like you have two heads. I don’t really know how to change this, but I feel like this is the central battle in the fight us scientists and nerds need to fight in order to get the world to give a shit… about anything. [1] this may be changing