[mechEpleb]

I get the feeling that the world was significantly more open to kids growing up with access to computers in the 80s and 90s, because as someone whose formative years were the 00s and early 10s, the interesting bits of technology were already buried under a thousand layers of abstraction and indirection. Kids nowadays won't ever learn what a shell is unless they go out of their way to learn it for some reason.

[todd8]

My daughter finished her CS degree about a year ago. I was glad to see that one required class had her build a very simple computer from gates as her final project. I don’t know the details, but I think the computer had perhaps 10 different instructions. She didn’t like that project very much, but I thought it was valuable; someone has got to understand the principles of operation at that level.

I started programming in the 60’s and at times had to load instructions into machines using binary on front panel switches. That’s the reasons that machines of that time had the lights and rows of switches on the front so that one could debug programs by looking at the lights to see the program counter, data value, or instruction. See [1] for a photo of a large front panel on an iconic machine of the time.

I even recall pulling plug panels out of card processing equipment to reprogram the sorting and selecting of input data being run through machine as huge stacks of punch cards, see [2] for a picture of a mid-20th century plug panel for data-processing.

The layers of abstraction are important. They enable us to construct some of the most useful, complex, and intricate artifacts ever made on our planet. Today I program in high level languages, and I get to use powerful frameworks, database systems, and amazing hardware right on my desk. Yet, I do miss some of the fun of invention and hacking on systems that I really understood in depth.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_panel#/media/File%3A36...

[2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/133017817600?hash=item1ef87ad200:g:...

[ksec]

>My daughter finished her CS degree about a year ago.

Interesting I thought CS was all software where computer with gate and low level programming were something of EE / Computer Engineering.

[dimal]

Sorry, you would be wrong. There was no internet. You were lucky if there was one other person around you who knew BASIC and could answer questions. Everything you needed to learn came in books that cost $30 each (at a time when $30 was a lot of money), and most of the books at the computer store were for using spreadsheets and word processors, not actually coding. Great, you had a DOS shell right in front of you, but learning what to do with it was a struggle. And writing .bat files isn’t very exciting. Maybe if you were in a place like SV, there would be tons of resources to learn, but in most other places you would be in an information desert. I was interested in computers but gave up because I hit the limit of what I could learn pretty quickly and couldn’t get any further. Kids have it MUCH better today.

[sensanaty]

That's really not true though, lots of dev-focused tools explicitly require hopping into a terminal and typing away commands. Plus at a certain point, anyone with any real curiosity is going to think "I wonder what's hidden behind these abstractions I see all the time?" and dig deeper anyways

[mechEpleb]

You'd think that, wouldn't you? Yet here I am, someone who grew up thinking computers were obtuse and boring because getting the computer to do anything interesting seemed like it would require knowing a thousand things not related to the issue at hand. I was always a mechanically minded person, so while the inner workings of things seemed interesting, making toy websites (the entry level computer thing to do in that time period) seemed about as interesting as watching paint dry.

But here I am, working as a software engineer and half way through my MSc in computer science. It took a couple of low level microcontroller classes in my mechanical engineering undergrad for me to see the light.

[bicolao]

It's still a lot harder (abstraction layers add complexity) to get close to metal as opposed to say, DOS.