This article about The Home Computer Generation struck a chord with me. I think there are a lot of us Gen Xers who fell in love with computing due to our early exposure to primitive home computers. I fondly remember the Atari 800. We had some games and a simple word processor (and a weird dot matrix printer that was super slow and noisy) but my favorite thing was Atari Basic. I typed in programs from the computer magazines at the time and spent hours debugging them so I could play games. I even went to Atari Computer Camp.
Although I lost the nerd thread in high school when I discovered girls and sports, that understanding of how you could program computers and make them do fun and interesting stuff was a part of me. To this day, I still enjoy doing a little bit of coding and trying to figure out how things work under the hood.
It’s different for digital natives like my kids. They have very little curiosity about how their phones and computers work. They just take it for granted. That’s not better or worse, just different. It’s probably analogous to the way my father understands how cars work. He had adjusted carburetors as a youth and has that intrinsic feel for how internal combustion engines work. I don’t really have that. Cars just work.
I wonder what is the equivalent thing for them to know intrinsically? Social media?