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[–] 12 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

I feel lucky that I was born at a time when computers were knowable. I grew up in the 80s, and cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum. Very little was hidden - even loading software into memory was something you experienced, listening to the beeps and warbles and watching the flashing colours for ten minutes or more. Guide books showed labelled photos and diagrams of the actual hardware inside, giving real tangible meaning to the commands you typed in.

I think there's a massive amount of disconnect now between the users and the actual hardware, and getting up to speed with how things work is so much more difficult.

Also, I'm lucky that I was born into a family that was just able to afford a microcomputer. My dad had a stable enough job that he was able to get a loan from the bank to buy one.

Not sure my life would have turned out the way it did without this starting point.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Same. Feels very old to say but computers are so much more complicated and abstracted now, I feel like they were much more approachable when there wasn't as much to them. Like being able to open the hood of a 60s era car and see all the discrete parts vs a 2020s car and you just see a tangle of plastic :/

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