Note that profit-driven entities can give away software, but only if it supports another artificially scarce good. Google rents space on its search tool, as Facebook rents space on its social media tool. Ad space is scarce, and made more valuable the more Google and Facebook give away (which is proportional to the attention they capture).
But devs generally don't like artificial scarcity, so the platforms need a path in for them. I think Apple demonstrates this most clearly: the iPad and iPhone are software consumption devices, but the Mac is also a software creation device, and therefore is generally more open, free, and changeable.
You remind me of Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation" keynote, which interestingly didn't notice that streaming and similar cloud-based services would become the DRM of the last decade.
Or, as it turns out, the rising appeal of non-general purpose devices that are more efficient.
This is wrong, and every open-source project including OpenBSD and Linux, emacs and vim is counter-evidence.
"A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for" -- this is correct.
I maintain an open source project that sits in a very small niche. Based on downloads, stars on GitHub, and comments on forums, I estimate that hundreds or thousands of people find it useful. I do get the occasional donation, but if I calculated dollars per hour that I have put into this project, it would probably be in the single digits.
In much the same way that a company can produce an open-source product and charge for support, feature development, consulting, data feeds and sometimes SAAS operation.
If that were the case no software would be written except by hobbyists as a kind of joke. Software provides value other than being scarce and it's really the maintenance of the software that people are wanting (those paying attention at least) not the software itself.
Worthless to whom? Maybe for corporations who want to make billions by exploiting a legal monopoly. For the rest of humanity, abundant software is extremely valuable.
We didn’t lose the hacker spirit. Go look at hackaday.com to see what people are working on. We simply gained an audience.
My point is, video games were my gateway to programming. I got into mods and then expanded from there. I'm sure I am not alone. It's these natural paths that spark curiosity which are being cut off.
Combine this with popular and easy game making software like RPGMaker, or even the ease that someone can set up a basic game on Unity. Beyond this, there are programs like Scratch and Processing that allow for fun and relatively easy computational tinkering.
I doubt the natural paths of curiosity have shrunk, though they may look different. Rather, the number of people using computers has massively increased, and the number of computer "tinkerers" is just a smaller proportion of people of the larger whole.
My point is that there is a small percentage of the population who are makers and a large percentage who are consumers. The Internet of 30 years ago was mostly populated by the makers so it felt like everyone was a maker. Now it is much more representative of the real public because the consumers joined. It now feels like it’s mostly consumers because in the world’s population consumers outnumber makers by a large percentage. However, and this is the crux of my point, the absolute number of makers did not go down and in fact went up. You won’t find many makers in your Facebook feed, in relative numbers. But maker communities are bigger, better, easier to find, and easier to join than ever before. Just because consumers have joined the makers does not mean that things are worse. They are better. The rest is nostalgia.
> //i.ibb.co/3Sv29Qs/23340-en-REVIEW-FINAL-Mail.png ^^
1. You can find any information you want, in an instant.
2. Hardware is very cheap, computers can be tiny, you can order components from anywhere
3. Robotics and electronics are way cooler now, with drones etc.
4. Software development is way more productive with all the libraries and tools we have right now.
5. When I was a kid, games were made by 1 or a few people. It quickly evolved into big studios. But nowadays, a solo or tiny team can release super successful games.
In the past I could get any component I might need from a local store in 20 minutes. now I've got 2 weeks to 3 months turnaround on shipping from shenzhen.
Not many people are, so local stores aren't as common.
I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need, and with enough technical expertise that you could show your circuit diagram and get feedback how to improve it. This is something only seen in shenzhen today.
Now I just don't do any small projects anymore as there are no stores in the entire state left, and the extreme premium in shipping and waiting time of aliexpress just isn't worth it anymore.
That sounds very atypical. I live outside a major US metro and I know of one good computer store in the area (Micro Center). I imagine there a few small places that carry electronic components but not sure how many. And it wasn't much different 10 to 20 years ago unless you count Radio Shack which wasn't really all that great.
There would be a queue of people waiting on a Saturday to give their handwritten list of components to an employee to go find.
Well. No. RadioShack is closed. Fry's is closed. If I needed a resistor, I honestly wouldn't know where to go. Probably AliExpress or DigiKey. There's no local stores left.
And companies sending parts remotely always existed, all that happened is now some have less access.
I meant the current trend of digital products which are, in my opinion, more like a TV than "computers".
Interesting that you mentioned you've moved to woodworking, as I found a way to rekindle my curiosity be exploring older technology as well. I've dived head first into antique clock and watch repair.
If you have any resources you can share/recommend, I'd be very curious also ;-)
Personally I started with restoring discarded and thrifted furniture. The initial outlay was just for some glue, varnish, and sandpaper.
That is true. But I really wonder if the hacker/consumer ratio has shifted over the years or not.
And games will look exponentially better considering the tools we have at disposition now. Also, selling millions of units of one game is "possible" even for Solo developers (while it's obviously going to be a superstar kind of probability). in the 90s reaching that kind of market was impossible without a huge corporation support.
I have been using laptops that can not be easily opened/upgraded for the last 4-5 years. Devices are being made mainly for people to consume media and that's it. I think computers of the earlier era and now are not at all comparable. The devices now are not really "computers" as they used to be. They are opaque all-soldered-and-sealed boxes. How will you inspire anyone to tinker with them?
Adding a graphics card to a box was such a cool thing for all of my gamer pals. Video cards, audio cards, or any upgrades would naturally involve casual talks about tech. Who does that these days, unless you own and upgrade a desktop?
Does that mean we've sadly come to the end of the era of hobbyist friendly alarm clocks? Maybe, but so what? We then got computers instead. Now we have Raspberry Pi's for kids who see cellphones as boring black boxes. There's always something and it's fine if it's not the same thing it used to be. The same thing happened with cameras - people used to build their own cameras out of bits of wood and develop their own pictures from glass plates. but cheap film cameras eliminated that hobby from the mainstream. It's fine. Technology moves on. Now we have 3D printers that enable kids to make things they never could have before without access to an expensive milling machine.
But, we've still got linux and a lot of hardware support for that. I'll likely be the last bastion of general purpose computing.
That was as good as it got. The difference between a beginnner dabbling with his first PRINT loop and an advanced assembly language programmer wasn't that great because the machine was so limited; you could go from one extreme to the other in skill in a year or two if you were interested enough. My natural response to seeing the "MISER" adventure, after solving it of course, was "I have all the programming skills to make a game like that" and did so.
And while then as now, only <1% of the general population was interested enough to get good at programming these things, another 10-20% was interested enough to hang around, dabble, try the latest cool programs that came down the pipe, or were made by the 1%. I had people playing a game that I made that consisted of one (long) line of BASIC.
Then, it seemed, most of the rest of the population (the other 80-90%) got computers too, Commodore 64s mostly where I lived. And still, even if only a tiny minority actually programmed their own stuff, it felt like a part of a vibrant scene, you could always show off your stuff.
With modern machines, even without the discouragement of locked down operating systems, missing accessible programming languages and such... there is just no hope of making something "cool" you can impress your friends with. So the tiny minority that does learn HTML5, Javascript, Arduino programming, what have you, is relatively obscure and seems to be a shadow of its former self. It isn't really. It's just that 99.99% of the computing power now in the hands of the population will never be tinkered with.
I believe there is hope of making cool graphics effects with GPU shaders. GPU tech is still advancing similar to how CPUs were back then, so people have not yet explored all the possibilities of the hardware. You can do impressive things just by experimenting even if you don't have a lot of theoretical knowledge. Sites like shadertoy.com make it easy to get started.
Every modern computing machine I know allows you to add a very rich set of coding tools, other than unjailbroken mobile devices perhaps. Yeah, poor access to mobile sucks, but if you feel the need to hack, you won't let walled gardens stop you.
Web scraping is an insanely rich source of data for building cool tools. Then you might add a bit of simple machine learning, like a voice-based interface or a GAN-based video face-melter or visualizing web-scraped results on a map. These sorts of tricks were hard or impossible to do 10 or 20 years ago. But not today.
If you want to hack, I'd start by immersing yourself in Linux. Or Raspberry Pi. Better yet, both.
I can personally attest to what a massive turn off this is. I grew up in an age when computers were a part of everyday life, but their inner workings - hidden behind a mountain of ugly obfuscation. If you find the rare trivial task like making stamped websites fascinating, good for you. But for people like me who couldn't care less, it takes some sort of external impetus to actually discover their interest in computing. In my case it was a half assed mandatory programming class in engineering school where I found out I had a talent for it, and discovered an interest in the inner workings of things I had been taking for granted all my life.
Just because resources are easy to find doesn't mean anybody cares for finding them.
So from a learning experience perspective, a kid tinkering with Linux might gain more insight into how computers work and than, say, on Windows or Mac.
Some of things are worse, but some things got infinitely better.
Walled gardens and specialization are somewhat different concepts. The former is primarily concerned with restricting how hardware is used, while the latter is mostly concerned with optimizing hardware for specific applications. While there are times when these two concerns can overlap, this need not be the case.
This can be seen historically. Early microprocessors were developed for integer calculations, with floating point operations being done in software or with an optional floating point coprocessor. Floating point was integrated, and became a fundamental part of our notion of general purpose microprocessors, later in the game. The path taken in computer graphics was much more complex, but it is also worth noting that it started off as specialized hardware. Experimentation resulted in GPUs becoming a generalized tool. Recent developments have encouraged them to diverge into a multitude of different specialized tools. Both of these examples illustrate how specialization has broadened what can be done, without creating and environment that restricts what can be done.
While I agree that walled gardens encourage media consumption at the expense of experimentation or creation, this is more of a cultural thing. There is far more money to be made in the former than the latter, so that is what the market focuses upon.
YouTube is a fantastic resource for any hobby or subject. It's like a world wide university.
> Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years
I think therein lies the rub. Teenagers curious about computers aren't very common. And even back then (early 2000s), my experience in Europe was the same [0]. Most of the people in my school didn't really care about computers. They had other interests and pursuits.
The difference today is that computers are much more widespread because they allow people to do much more diverse things. At the time, they would maybe type up a report or something and that's it. There wasn't Facebook et al., so many people didn't spend any significant amount of time in front of the computer. Idle time would mostly be spent in front of the TV or hanging out with friends.
I think the reason this perception comes up is that at the time, people who "spent time on computers" were doing so out of curiosity and interest in learning about them. So the shortcut is that since now many more people are spending a good chunk of their day in front of the computer, that must mean they're as interested in them as the "curious teenagers" of our time. That's simply not true. Just look at what they do on the computer. It's mostly idle scrolling on some form of social media.
And, to address the subject of the OP, I'm also wondering whether there's an actual decline in the "general-purposeness" of the computer, as opposed to there just being more "non general-purpose" computers.
There's a definite decline in the percentage, and maybe even in absolute numbers if we look at people who used to use computers because they had no alternative but who are now better served by smartphones or tablets and also for uses which need "specialized processors" (say ML).
I draw a parallel to my feeling whenever I see discussions about iOS being locked down and people expecting the whole of the HN crowd to be up in arms about it. In my case, I was one of those curious teenagers of yore. I still love tinkering with computers, etc. But phones? I just can't be bothered to care about them. Can I make calls and check some maps? It's great!
I have an iPhone and treat it pretty much like a dishwasher. I barely have any apps installed. Neither allows me to install whatever random app I want. It's not an issue for my dishwasher, and frankly, nor is it for my iPhone. Whatever "general computing" I feel like doing, I prefer doing it on an actual computer.
Of course, there are other philosophical considerations in this discussion which I understand and can get behind, but the point is that, to many people, a computer is an appliance. They want it to do certain things. Does it do that? Great! If it doesn't, it's not fit for purpose. They simply do not care if some guy some where would like to do some thing with it but can't because Microsot / Apple are locking it down.
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[0] I went to school in the suburbs of Paris, so many of the kids' parents were pretty well-off and many were even working in computer-related fields, so there wasn't any access problem. Practically all of them actually had at least one up-to-date computer at home.
Computers are an idealised example of an organised system which is assembled/operated by solving puzzles. Some people enjoy solving those kinds of puzzles. Most people don't. The first kind of person doesn't really understand the second kind of person - and vice versa.
Something interesting and disturbing has been happening over the last twenty years. The Internet stopped being a technological puzzle and became a social and political puzzle.
This kind of "cultural engineering" - where the currency is attention, influence, patronage, and sometimes actual spending, not puzzle prowess - appeals to a completely different kind of person. And these people have been driving the development of the Internet for a while now.
People who like solving computer puzzles have been completely blindsided by this and continue to act as if technology is still somehow primary - when it isn't, and hasn't been for a while.
Plenty of puzzle lovers don't care about computers at all. Plenty of good programmers and tinkerers don't care about puzzles of different kind.
The “internet” as a thing is still capable of the same things it was 20 years ago. The proportion of people using the internet who care more about the social and political puzzle rather than the technological is what dramatically increased.
I understand where you are coming from, and it makes 100% sense if you own a PC/laptop as well. But guess what? In a lot of places the majority of population (including younger people) do NOT have them. Their first and only experience of computers is a mobile phone. Even though "teenagers who care about computers" is a low number, now a lot of them won't realize that something like a general purpose computer exists (until way later, if they end up using a computer at work).
I grew up being fascinated with how useful and flexible computers are and fell in love with creating software. I'm quite sure that I would not have happened if I was born during the last 10 years.
Broadly, I could see two situations in which people only get a phone and have no computer: either "poor" countries, where they can't afford a computer and will get a phone that's better than nothing, and very affluent ones where they'll just get a phone or tablet and not care. Although I'm not sure that this second category has no computer.
While I do sympathize with this, and I think that it would more likely than not allow people to discover this curiosity by, as you say, being fascinated with how flexible phones would be, my point is somewhat different: this isn't "going back". Phones never were open. And I'm pretty sure that the people who can't afford a computer now couldn't afford one in the 90s.
As such, for me, this is more of a lost opportunity to progress rather than a regression.
> Phones never were open
They certainly were more open than today. It was much easier to fiddle around with the software with smartphones that Nokia used to have, for example. Both iOS and Android were easier in that respect, too. So there's clearly been a regression there. However, if you meant "phones were never as open as PCs", ah yes then I agree.
> As such, for me, this is more of a lost opportunity to progress rather than a regression.
I would agree with the spirit of that, but the problem is that a lot of computers are actually being "dumbed down" so that they are more similar to phones simply because a larger population is used to them. For example most young people might not find it weird if some day MS or Apple make it painfully difficult to install PC/Mac apps from outside their stores.
You're right we are not there yet (yay?), but we seem to be moving towards that.
Uh, as a young person during that time, I think there may have been one kid in my high school who was the right combination of nerdy and well-off to get a smartphone. It was still cool if your flip-phone came with any internet-connected features at all.
I’m not sure why it has become so common on HackerNews to defend this trend and/or pretend it’s not a trend.
When I was a kid we had 8bit micros. They were programmable but they were also eye wateringly expensive. So it was a struggle to own anything you could program at all.
Also they all came with closed source, proprietary OSs.
I used to spend a fair amount of time just starring at adverts for things I couldn’t afford and that would be obsolete before I could.
Now you can get a whole computer given away free on the front cover of a magazine and it will do a pretty good job of running scratch for you.
When I was in university in the Netherlands studying CS in the early 90s, many (I would say most) didn't care about computers; they were there because 'money later' or 'making games'. By far most never wrote a line of code. It was frightening (to me) how much they had to catch up as the lectures were fast paced. Many changed to psychology or law in the first 2 years.
Now we live in an age where multiple versions of nearly everything seems to be available. Just buy what you want, don't learn to make it would seem to be the imperative of the day.
That encouraged tinkering to a high degree. I remember having lengthy talks about what components to use to build a PC with gamers or videgraphers. The more computers become a closed box which can not be opened, casual onlookers will have no reason to even configure them.
The industry is simply not giving people a box to open.
The industry is, it’s people who don’t want it.
The sealed boxes are some combination of more resistant to damage and longer lasting and smaller fo factor that a modular box can’t be, the sealed software is less prone to malware and blue screens of death.
The cloud makes things work like an appliance, rather than having to worry about dying drives and backups and figuring out port forwarding on your router. It also helps companies extract maximum rents on their product, but the point is it came with some benefits that consumers do value.
Nowadays however most white-collar jobs and daily life tasks involve computers at some point, and knowing how to use & program them would make these tasks more efficient - almost too efficient, to the point where it goes against corporate interests (turns out society normalized and encourages business models that bank on artificially created or maintained inefficiency) which is partly why general-purpose computing is on the decline now.
> Nowadays most people I see of that age group
These are not the same people at all.
Have a look at GNU/Linux phones recently developed:
Plenty of your peers were not on those chat rooms. They did not interacted with tech like you or even did not interacted with tech at all. They had different hobbies and interests, different habits then you.
I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other day.
Nowadays most people I see of that age group are happy with a YouTube video on their smartphones. General purpose of computers is simply not visible. Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years from so far in India.
We have too many tall-walled gardens now.
Update: I should add I am happy with how powerful computers are these days, but they are not for the purpose of learning or tinkering the actual device or its software. It is just way to consume media for the mainstream.