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by f0e4c2f7 1495 days ago
When I was a kid I spent too much time on computers but it was mostly reading Wikipedia and googling programming questions, that kind of stuff.

Where I grew up there wasn't anyone around I could ask those kinds of questions of. I know that's not the Netflix / ipad world that the study is talking about or nessecarily exists today. But I suspect that bifurcation still exists.
2 comments
ho_schi 1495 days ago
My entry was scripting in Counter-Strike (Quake CFG Scripts). This cannot happen with consoles and Apps on Pads/Smartphones entirely prevent this.

Some people try to bring this modification friendly things back, with BBC Microbit, RasPi and so on. But in the end you need to be motivated - and playing better was huge motivation for me!

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fartcannon 1495 days ago
Which is a good reason to encourage Apple to open up their tiny handheld computers. So kids can learn to tinker.
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switchbak 1494 days ago
My early days were DOS mode-x experiments mainly in Turbo Pascal. I had a manual I printed out, and some kind of BBS usenet-like forum thing.

The docs were so sparse and the communities so small that it really was a much different experience than today. I have fond memories of it, but that might just be me looking back with rose colored glasses.

I would have killed for stack overflow though! But there is a sense of self directed mastery that you don't get when you are so much more familiar with how fast the bodies of knowledge are.

The closest I get to that these days is trying to hack code on a plane :)

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