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One thing I agree with the letter-writer about -- we may have been the last generation to grow up smarter than our computers. I had a Vic 20 in early grade school, than an Apple //c, then a 286-clone by middle school and then upgraded that piecemeal through college. Now I buy cheapish laptops from ebay that corporations have finished leasing.
Maybe it's fogey-ish of me, but it's nice to feel like I could scan a paper for errors faster than spellcheck could run on Bank Street Writer, or that my friends could draw better than any computer game. There was a sense of ceding power to the machine, temporarily, but we were still master. Now kids have machines that can do everything better than they can, right from the start -- but of course that just inspires some of them to come up with new things that they can do that simply use the computer, just as we did.
Oh, and I don't know if anyone's mentioned it yet, but ThinkGeek has a make-your-own-Pong kit.
