Brazilian Favelas spring to mind.

Yeah, like that.

Did you mean that in a negative way? The way I see it, favelas are more of a government problem, not enforcing rules and standards leads to people making up their own (just like Internet standards).

Going with my analogy, someone who built their own house in the favelas is, in fact, "house literate". Their home might be sub-standard, but they can take care of it all on their own.

"housing illiteracy" was your example not mine. I was just suggesting a possible parallel with how great the divide is now compared with the days when the vast majority of the world was lucky to lay their hands on a Z80.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. It seems we're agreeing on there being a divide, except I think the current situation is just a natural result of widespread adoption.

There's more people tinkering with dev boards and writing open source software, too, so it's not all bad.

Im saying I really started noticing the divide between the computer literate and the computer illiterate - that its actually becoming an issue in exactly the same ways general illiteracy became an issue as reading and writing became widespread.

With likely similar implications.

Which makes me sad.

Yeah, it is pretty sad. I'm really worried about manufacturers locking down everything, both in software and hardware.

And people just don't care because they don't know how or why it affects them, until it's too late.

Can't really force everyone to learn IT more in-depth, but maybe making IT/computing a higher priority in schools is a good idea.