John Goerzen
1/ A #Sunday morning thread on #vintageComputing, computers as #programmable, #nostalgia, and #floppydisks .
In her delightful forward to "Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium," Lori Emerson describes people visiting he Media Archaeology Lab. She describes the delight - even for people too young to possibly have nostalgia for using floppies - of using those computers and disks.
John Goerzen
3/ She continues, "They don't need to hear a lecture... about the trajectory of computing to immediately understand that the current paired practices of blackboxing devices and making them functionally obsolete within just a few years of their making is destroying the planet and its inhabitants... Floppy disks and old computing are not the answers to our problems -- but they are... vehicles to rethink what's pragmatically and philosophically possible."
John Goerzen
2/ Lori recalls "that time period, sometime between the 1970s and the 1990s, when we had a sense about how our computers worked... when we knew where our data lived and we also knew who (not what) we were sharing our data with." She says, "these young people walk out of the lab seemingly buoyed with both longing for a world they never lived in and hope for a future world that is unlike the on ethey're in right now."
John Goerzen
16/ But what they meant was pretty clear. Those that still manage a desire to get into programming these days find themselves dropped into a culture of containers, VMs, CI in the cloud, vscode to some remote thing somewhere hand-wavy.
The funny thing about it is - a lot of these people never write code to run on their computer. They use a Mac to write code that will run on a pretend (virtual) Linux computer somewhere.
John Goerzen
15/ I started to notice a few years back when interviewing for jobs that the most sophisticated of companies would comment positively that "you have used hardware."
I. Have used..... #hardware?
Hasn't everyone?
John Goerzen
14/ Don't get me wrong; there is a place for a cloud, as anyone that knows someone that's lost precious family photos can attest. I now mostly outsource my email hosting to @mailbox_org . I run my own @nextcloud , but I might buy a hosted version if I want.
My point isn't that the evil is a thriving marketplace for people to run computer services so you don't have to.
Rather, it's telling people they can't run their own cloud or program their own device.
John Goerzen
13/ I built my own LAN, at first with 10Base2 (Coax/thinwire) Ethernet. I set up email servers and FTP servers and telnet servers in my parents' house because I finally could!
The great expansion of Linux ought to have led to a generation of doers!
But instead, makers are a minority. Even with projects like #FreedomBox and #Nextcloud, people don't go there.
And why?
Because they don't believe they can.
John Goerzen
12/ When I discovered #FreeBSD and #Linux in about 1995, I was hooked. Hooked by several things: the concept of #FreeSoftware, the entire system being no cost, and being able to run servers.
Back in the day, #WordPerfect or #Word, or a spreadsheet, often cost $400-$500. Server software and hardware, such as Netware, would have been thousands. It was utterly unavhievable for the individual. Not everything was glorious in those days.
John Goerzen
11/ You could as easily substitute Firefox or Safari for Chrome, or Word or Libreoffice for Google Docs. The point isn't the particular software; the point is the intentional isolation from the device, the lerned helplessness.
John Goerzen
10/ Every kid has a school-assigned laptop at my boys' school, starting from about age 10. It has Chrome (subject to some school filters). They learn how to use Google Docs and a web browser. They use their laptops in most classes.
Then the school tells us parents they are distracted by their laptops.
Well of COURSE they're distracted by their laptops. You have given them a device, and blocked everything except the social sites specifically designed to steal their attention. Surprised?
John Goerzen
9/ A whole generation has grown up being isolated from the computer, being told they are too stupid to use it safely, that the computer is dangerous, and that it is best used as a machine for Youtube and Tiktok.
A whole generation.
My generation grew up being told, "Here's an amazing box that can do anything you set your mind to, and adults mostly don't understand it as well as kids your age do."
John Goerzen
8/ The great disservice #Apple did the world was showing how it was profitable to treat the customer as an idiot.
"We know you don't REALLY want a floppy drive."
"We know better than you what to run on your device."
And ultimately, "You can't be trusted to program your own device."
That is the same message the schools are giving kids with the locked-down laptops: "You can't be trusted."
In the 80s and 90s, teachers pulled me out of class to help them with computer problems.
John Goerzen
7/ I don't miss the slow, unreliable nature of floppy drives.
What I miss is that computer makers gave me, the customer, some credit.
Oh sure, maybe they had to.
But they sold a product with the expectation that the customer would figure out how to use it. Some customers would figure out how to make it do new tricks.
John Goerzen
6/ As a child in the 1980s, growing up with a BASIC-based computer, I certainly knew less about computers than I do now; I had only a vague notion that there was this thing called "assembly". But you turn on the computer, and 2 seconds later you see "OK" and a flashing cursor. Now what? Anything. Write a program, load a program, run one, modify one. I type LOAD"GAME.BAS" and I literally feel the floppy drive. I know what a track is, because I can feel the stepper motor during formatting.
John Goerzen
5/ My kids' school gives them Chromebooks. While a Chromebook isn't necessarily locked down in the way the iPad is, it can be configured to be, and the schools do. My kids know ChromeOS has a fully-functional Linux environment, but are prohibited from accessing it. They know there are ssh apps, Git apps, etc., but they can't access them, either.
Most kids don't know this.
In an era where we go on and on about the importance of #coding and #STEM, we teach kids to be feeble consumers.
John Goerzen
4/ Let's sit with these thoughts a minute. Aren't we living in an era where there is an effort to stamp out the notion of a general-purpose programmable #computer? Apple would love us to believe that the iPad - filled with hardware every bit capable of being a general-purpose computer - is a device for consumption, one which runs apps written by others, one which actively thwarts efforts to program on it. The home PCs of the 80s were programmable in a way the iPad isn't.
John Goerzen
17/ So even when we have those souls that have made it through all those years of being told they can't be trusted to program a computer, and they start programming....
Well, they aren't programming a computer.
Not really. They're programming a pretend computer that lives within a real one.
In fact, they do most of their programming using a device designed to keep them from programming it.
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