[teekert]

Ah, nice short story, similar to mine. I did a lot of XP reinstalling myself. Before that I was a full time autoexe.bat hacker.

The computers we got were always expensive though, I don't know what our 386 cost, but our pentium mmx 150 MHz was the equivalent of 1500 euro's. I wasn't allowed to open it.

Imagine how thrilled I am with current day Raspberry Pi's! I tell my kids they can do whatever they want with them! I got a second hand pretty good HP business model laptop, put Ubuntu on it, made accounts for the kids. I tell them they have to figure stuff out themselves. The thing can do so much! But it just isn't the same to them it seems.

Maybe the magic, the newness, the expensiveness was part of the appeal for me, maybe the kids are just swamped in compute power and touchscreens from birth, it's too normal. Maybe my kids just aren't nerds like me. I don't know. I gave up the pushing, instead I focus on them getting things done and working themselves. They have the time to figure stuff out, even if they are almost dying to see the next (animated) episode of Lassie on Netflix (what a dog, animated or not)...

I remember a blog being posted here on HN where a fellow hacker did all of the tech for his family (a natural instinct), and he created a bunch of digital illiterates as a results. I'm trying to not fall for that trap at the very least.

[xyanb]

> Maybe the magic, the newness, the expensiveness was part of the appeal for me, maybe the kids are just swamped in compute power and touchscreens from birth, it's too normal.

I think so too. In my case, it was all new stuff and everybody was trying to figure it out, myself included. Technology is way more common now than it was then!

> I remember a blog being posted here on HN where a fellow hacker did all of the tech for his family, and he created a bunch of digital illiterates as a results. I'm trying to not fall for that trap at the very least.

About 12 years too late on that one for me!