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• Wednesday, September 27, 2006 12:01 PM

  Took the Words out of My Mouth

  I don't think anybody under the age of 30 can really understand what it was like having a computer in the 80s. If you wanted to play around with computers in the most casual sense, you were introduced to programming. Sure, there were cartridge games and cassettes, but a good many of us got our computer games out of books. We could spend an hour hunt-and-pecking something into our Co-Co 2s and 64s, hoping it worked as promised. We'd play it, then we'd mess around with it, changing things and seeing what happened. From there, it was not far to creating our own games, or any programs we wanted. I once wrote one that attempted to pick racehorses using information from the racing form.

  And it wasn't just that we all programmed. We all programmed in essentially the same language, whatever machine we used. That was what made it possible for this to spill out into other areas of our education, such as the textbooks quoted in Brin's article. And it was so easy. We picked it up fast. By high school, I knew guys who had already moved on to C and beyond. These guys didn't have to look for a program that did what they wanted, they just wrote it.

  Less than ten years after I graduated high school, I asked a guy in his senior year if they still taught BASIC. He said "Yeah, basic computer skills." Right. The computer course he took involved using prepackaged software. When I did it, we learned programming.

  Today, kids can use computers for hours a day and not have the first clue what makes them work or how to make them do something else. In general, the world seems to have become a place with no user-serviceable parts. Or at least it has become such that only the more curious of us are willing to try and understand it.

  Knowledge is power, but people today use a lot of things they really know nothing about. And it's getting easier and easier for people to live that way. And so much of it gets wrapped up in ideas of new and better vs. old and obsolete. That's not what it's about at all.

  Thanks, David Brin, for saying what needs to be said.

  —Andy
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