My question exactly. My son recently saved up his lawnmowing money and bought himself a couple-year old HTC phone. We put cyanogenmod on it and he's figuring out which games will run on it and how to extend the battery life and I think, maybe, he's having a similar sort of experience. I don't know though, it doesn't seem the same as sharing floppy disks, playing Trade Wars on the local BBS, and installing your first Soundblaster.
I have fond memories of learning how to interact with the family PC but nothing close to what I read about the original days when home computing and hacker culture was growing. It makes me envious to a degree, like I love programming and all that comes with it but when I read pieces like this that evoke so much fond emotion attached to the skill...I don't know...its a little foreign. To me programming and computing in general is this thing that I am good at, that brings me happiness because I like to solve problems but to people like the author it seems like something more. A dear loved one that will always warm their heart.
I'm not sure it will ever be the same as it was back then, to be a pioneer...
I have had a relationship with computing like many of the commenters here. I remember our kindergarten teacher letting us take turns grounding ourselves under the keyboard of an Apple IIe. I can't explain it but I could tell from that moment that I had a thing for computing technology.
I remember playing games at a friend's house on an IBM PC. Her dad worked there and we would just mess around and had no idea what we were doing in the game. I just loved interacting with the thing.
I remember long nights playing games on my cousin's C64. Playing Archon and some racing game. Doing basic programming.
I begged my parents for a computer and we eventually got one in 1993. It cost around $2,000 back then and was 33 MHz, had 8 MB RAM, and had a 207 MB hard drive. No sound card, CD ROM, or printer at the time. Game over from that point on. I knew I had to do something in computing technology for a living.
Things seem so figured out these days. I wonder if kids get that same feeling of novelty we got back then?