> "didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer"

You realize that mass adoption of the "home computer" is a very, very recent phenomenon, right? I grew up with a computer in the late 80s/early 90s because my father was in the field, but most of my neighbours did not start getting computers until the mid 90s. IMHO the image of the precocious youngster learning to hack on the machine his family just happened to have is a bit of selection bias.

People look back at the wonderful days of the 70s and 80s with rose tinted glasses - the truth of the matter is back then computers were exclusively hacking machines (i.e., you couldn't work them at all without some fairly in-depth knowledge), you did buy them just to hack on it.

A lot of people grew up in 80s with computers used primarily for games. I was a kid in glory days of 8-bit computers (Atari, Commodore, Sinclair). There were many many millions sold of those.

So yes, many precocious youngsters of my generation learned to hack just because they happened to have computer (bought for non-hacking purpose) and it was tempting and possible to tinker.

People had these computers for reasons other than to tinker. The example given in TFS is about a dad using a machine as a wordprocessor. I have an arduino board because I grew up tinkering and the arduino lets me relive the late nights spent up learning, but they are not something that anybody who isn't already a tinkerer will buy.

But the Apple IIe cost $1400 in 1983 (over $3000 in today's dollars), so most people never had a "main computer" to begin with. Now vastly more people can own a computer at all. And the type of person who spent a month's wages to tinker with a computer in the 1980s is not going to buy an iPad as their only computer today.

> And the type of person who spent a month's wages to tinker with a computer in the 1980s is not going to buy an iPad as their only computer today.

So, the only people that bought an Apple IIe were tinkerers already? What about the example of the father that bought it for the word processor? Is that example entirely unreasonable or blatantly false?

What about the Commodore 64?

Why are we talking about the Apple IIe? I'm sure a lot more people that learned to code and about the guts of the machine in the 80's did so on Speccies (£180 in 1984), C64s ($595 in 82) or Amigas ($699 in 1987) than on Apples/IBMs.

I was bought a Spectrum as a child (and saved up christmas money for an Amiga). My parents weren't at all technical. I learnt a bit of BASIC but not much (I didn't have the patience to program much), but I did get a decent understanding of what went on inside. So I was happy to build my own computers.