[xsmasher]

I disagree with the "People began to stop being [creators/hacker]" part - the existing people didn't change, the market OPENED UP to allow people who were not hackers and computer experts to be computer users. This is a good thing; otherwise computers would have remained a niche hobby like ham radio or woodcarving.

You're right that the average computer owner is not as savvy about the internals as before, but that's just because the pool of computer owners has expanded so much, on account of the simpler and consistent and more learnable interfaces.

[oblio]

Agreed. PCs scaled to billions of users. Programming knowledge scales to a much lower level, I believe there's only millions of programmers or at best tens of millions.