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.
> 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.
I've tried to get my kids into tinkering with computers by showing them how to write Python code (with Thonny) and installing lots of programs for drawing etc.
They are curious, and they do tinker with stuff when I'm there, but about 10 minutes after I leave the room they'll find a way to watch cartoons.
Somehow the internet has become this huge distraction and mostly just a replacement for a TV. I kinda miss what it was like in the 1990ies and early 2000s.
I resemble that. Somehow the lack of internet out where I live has ended up with me building an 85km FTTH network over the past 4 years. Hopefully it will double in size this year now that it's finally bootstrapped to profitability.
Agreed! I had a recent experience with no internet and was running around my house yanking coax cables, checking my electrical cupboard and whacking the router.
Turns out, there was a line issue outside my house :P
Would you please not cross into personal attack? It's not allowed here, and it's particularly destructive in highly emotional areas like parenting. Please make your substantive points without that and without name-calling.
Thonny and the turtle package are pretty neat. Not quite as direct as Bret Victors examples, but you have immediate feedback and a debugger.
The Python arcade package is also absolutely fun. We spent a day programming a Snake-clone, and some things like the predefined color names are just hilarious. (But I realised that building a game with a run loop is probably too hard for beginners)
My main problem is the difficulty part you mention: There's a pretty big step before you can do rewarding things like moving the player with keyboard control in a fun way.
Creation vs. consumption.
If everyone consumes, who creates ?
And why is everyone pushed towards consumption of content.
Easy vs. hard.
The hard way is the right way.
Never knew you could do a remote shutdown like this, but we did find out about a "net send" command to put popups onto other kids' computers.
Later we found a neat exploit / remote access kit, friend of mine could merge the backdoor onto a random .exe file (we used a desktop sheep because ha ha look at the funny sheep). We got that onto a number of school PC's and told people off for using MSN at school for example. I also used it on my parents' computer and found out how much they had on their savings account.
Hazy memory but I forged the NetWare login screen to grab admin password then replaced the original login process with one that logged all logins. Was a moron and left a printout somewhere and I was the first suspect. Had a good relationship with the compsci teachers so I somehow ended up getting a shared office and got paid by the school to secure their systems.
This is true! I also have a good story about how certain network cameras were left unprotected on the school network and some individuals took advantage of that by guessing the default password.
nLite! That brings back memories. Customizing a Windows Installation to remove bloatware, add additional software and make it run unattended. It was a tinkerer’s dream :)
I kinda relived parts of my own childhood with the story. Funnily written for childhood memoirs :)
In my case the magical Windows version was Windows 95 Final Beta (AKA Chicago), which I managed to get through my fathers connections. Oh boy it was exciting for a fouth-grader to install it and figure out what went wrong etc.
(Although I strongly was in the OS/2 and Mac camps at the time;-)
Windows was far more common in our household than Mac and Linux. I think I saw a Mac laptop once when I was a kid. I had no clue what that thing was! Bit of a learning curve coming from Windows.
This reminds my childhood computer stories and how I got into using Linux in 10th grade. My parents installed the K9 Website blocker on Windows which was (is?) a pretty strong domain blocking tool. Let alone anything NSFW, Youtube and Facebook were blocked too! I learned a bit about dual booting online and with a freshly burned CD of Ubuntu 12.04, I was determined not to screw things up. I was pretty happy I installed Ubuntu safely and it was a relief to find that the parental website blockers of Windows had no equivalents on Ubuntu. I often think that I probably wouldn't have had a headstart on using Linux and programming had it not been for wanting to circumvent website blocking tools.
When I was 10, I painted all the light on my computer case black with watercolor so I can keep it running to download Mandrake linux without my mom noticing —- it would take more than a day to download with a 56kbps connection. Somehow she did find out in just a few hours, may be I should ask her how :-)
I also had the windows key memorized just like the author does. But it was windows 98, and I can’t recall it now. I think the last time I tried to write it out was when I was around 18, so the key lasted at least 10 years in my memory
LOL in 9th grade, my dad took away my computer for getting bad grades. He took just the tower and stashed it in his bedroom.
My workaround was to open up the case while he was gone, and take all the components out of it. I took the Power supply, hard drive, motherboard, and all the components except floppy drive and CDROM, since those were visually external. Basically he had an empty ATX case sitting in his room.
I packed all that hardware into my backpack, no static bags, no boxes, just that hardware flopping around in my bag... I took it went to my friends house and just would go over there and use it after school instead. When it was time to get it back, I loaded all my hardware back in, and he never found out...
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.