7 ms·

That 2007 passage really brought me to a grinding hault. Toddlers are using the web these days from the moment they can swipe a screen. I have a hard time bel

by Timpy 6y ago

That 2007 passage really brought me to a grinding hault. Toddlers are using the web these days from the moment they can swipe a screen. I have a hard time believing anybody on GitHub over the age of 20 only began using the internet in 2007.

jcranmer 6y ago
The technology to let toddlers use the web didn't really exist until rather recently. In 2003, we got broadband internet at our house. Before then, when we only had dial-up, only a single computer in the house could use the internet. Broadband internet brought with it external modems you could connect to via wifi rather than sitting inside your computer [1], and this meant you could use other devices than the primary family computer to browse the internet, even assuming you had more computers in your household than just the one. The iPhone came out in 2007, and is generally credited with ushering in the smartphone revolution. The iPad came out in 2010, making a somewhat larger form factor to enable the touchscreen interaction with the computer. From observation of my 3-year-old nephew, his ability to meaningfully use the computer via keyboard and mouse is quite limited. And I'm not sure he's all that capable with the touchscreen; he still hasn't understood that the reason he can't see me is that my phone doesn't have a camera and tries pushing stuff on the phone to make the camera turn on, inevitably resulting in him pushing the "end call" button. I can totally buy a 10-year-old in 2007 who had never used the internet, especially if they came from a poorer household that didn't have the ability to keep up with technology and lived in a school district that didn't have the ability to give all their kids laptops. [1] This does also show my age, as I never experienced the age of external modems connected via serial cables.
fallat 6y ago
I didn't regularly use the Internet until I was 13ish. I wanted to be fair in the timeframe so that's why I said that. I probably encountered the Internet many many times before then, but it was not for regular usage.
- mdip 6y ago
  A little off topic, but thanks for sharing: The age of 13 seems to be a common thread with a lot of developers -- I know of 5 others who will point to that age as "when they started writing software". It was age 13 when I started assembling and selling PCs (in the 90s) and began exploring software development and before my 14th birthday that I had re-written a BBS application in PASCAL. Like you, I had been messing around with my (horrible) computer[0] since it arrived in our house and I was presented with an `A>` with no clue how to proceed, but it wasn't until I was 13 that my Dad presented me with a plan and a book to fix that problem[1]. I wanted a 386 so I could play Wing Commander (and see more than the 4 colors that my CGA display allowed -- loved the LSD trip that games like Kings Quest would put you through while trying to render decent graphics using practically nothing, but I was ready to be done with that). I remember thinking my dad was insane -- he owned a business selling things to large automotive manufacturers ... nothing event adjacent to computers. And a computer was easily the most complicated consumer electronics device a person could own. Having had to fix our 8088 a few times, and being generally the most "handy person" I've ever known, his response was a dismissive "they're all just a bunch of parts that you buy and put together". And while I'm pretty sure he helped me build/troubleshoot the first couple of them (we had some bad components early on from a vendor in California), I generally built/tested/assembled all of the few hundred that we sold, myself. If you want a 13-year-old to behave more like a "Grown Up", well, when your Dad's friends are paying you thousands of dollars to build them a computer, you start to act like someone who's worthy of receiving that kind of trust. The best part: we built the first several computers to pay for the one we wanted for ourselves[2]. My dad owned his company. I'm willing to wager that he could have afforded to just buy the thing for me and probably wouldn't have felt all that guilty about spoiling his kid since I was using it 99% of the time to do things other than play games. But this served as a forcing function -- I got the exact computer with the exact specifications that I wanted without having to think about the cost of those things provided I could sell enough computers to purchase it. I did. And I got to buy a convertible for my first car with money I had earned. I'm seeing it now, in my own kids, two of which turn 13 in the next few months. They're working with Roblox's developer tools making new worlds and I'm staring over their shoulder thinking: this application is easily as complicated to use as any of the design tools I've been exposed to and these kids are just ripping through it like it's "not work" (if only they were getting paid!). I've been looking for things to motivate them to step out of the "game world" and realize that the things they're doing could be done outside of Roblox -- they could make real applications, but much like I didn't believe my dad when he handed me that book, they haven't had that "ah ha" moment, yet. [0] My friends all had Commodore 64s and such that played really cool (if slowly loading) games and cost a few hundred dollars. We had a $3,000 IBM 8088 clone with a 10MB hard drive and floppy drive that ... wasn't fun. [1] I can't remember the title completely but it was something like "Build an 80486 PC and Save A Bundle" [2] My 80486, if memory serves, cost just shy of $10,000. We went with what would be called "server hardware" these days: SCSI over (very new) IDE or (very old) MFM -- we went SCSI with a full height 360MB drive (40MB drives were huge), a very nice video card and a 18" CRT display (14" was 'normal' with anything above starting at twice the price of the best 14" display). And two modems... I ran a multi-node BBS on custom software originally based on Telegard.

by Timpy 6y ago

jcranmer 6y ago

The technology to let toddlers use the web didn't really exist until rather recently. In 2003, we got broadband internet at our house. Before then, when we only had dial-up, only a single computer in the house could use the internet. Broadband internet brought with it external modems you could connect to via wifi rather than sitting inside your computer [1], and this meant you could use other devices than the primary family computer to browse the internet, even assuming you had more computers in your household than just the one. The iPhone came out in 2007, and is generally credited with ushering in the smartphone revolution. The iPad came out in 2010, making a somewhat larger form factor to enable the touchscreen interaction with the computer. From observation of my 3-year-old nephew, his ability to meaningfully use the computer via keyboard and mouse is quite limited. And I'm not sure he's all that capable with the touchscreen; he still hasn't understood that the reason he can't see me is that my phone doesn't have a camera and tries pushing stuff on the phone to make the camera turn on, inevitably resulting in him pushing the "end call" button. I can totally buy a 10-year-old in 2007 who had never used the internet, especially if they came from a poorer household that didn't have the ability to keep up with technology and lived in a school district that didn't have the ability to give all their kids laptops. [1] This does also show my age, as I never experienced the age of external modems connected via serial cables.

fallat 6y ago

I didn't regularly use the Internet until I was 13ish. I wanted to be fair in the timeframe so that's why I said that. I probably encountered the Internet many many times before then, but it was not for regular usage.

mdip 6y ago
A little off topic, but thanks for sharing: The age of 13 seems to be a common thread with a lot of developers -- I know of 5 others who will point to that age as "when they started writing software". It was age 13 when I started assembling and selling PCs (in the 90s) and began exploring software development and before my 14th birthday that I had re-written a BBS application in PASCAL. Like you, I had been messing around with my (horrible) computer[0] since it arrived in our house and I was presented with an `A>` with no clue how to proceed, but it wasn't until I was 13 that my Dad presented me with a plan and a book to fix that problem[1]. I wanted a 386 so I could play Wing Commander (and see more than the 4 colors that my CGA display allowed -- loved the LSD trip that games like Kings Quest would put you through while trying to render decent graphics using practically nothing, but I was ready to be done with that). I remember thinking my dad was insane -- he owned a business selling things to large automotive manufacturers ... nothing event adjacent to computers. And a computer was easily the most complicated consumer electronics device a person could own. Having had to fix our 8088 a few times, and being generally the most "handy person" I've ever known, his response was a dismissive "they're all just a bunch of parts that you buy and put together". And while I'm pretty sure he helped me build/troubleshoot the first couple of them (we had some bad components early on from a vendor in California), I generally built/tested/assembled all of the few hundred that we sold, myself. If you want a 13-year-old to behave more like a "Grown Up", well, when your Dad's friends are paying you thousands of dollars to build them a computer, you start to act like someone who's worthy of receiving that kind of trust. The best part: we built the first several computers to pay for the one we wanted for ourselves[2]. My dad owned his company. I'm willing to wager that he could have afforded to just buy the thing for me and probably wouldn't have felt all that guilty about spoiling his kid since I was using it 99% of the time to do things other than play games. But this served as a forcing function -- I got the exact computer with the exact specifications that I wanted without having to think about the cost of those things provided I could sell enough computers to purchase it. I did. And I got to buy a convertible for my first car with money I had earned. I'm seeing it now, in my own kids, two of which turn 13 in the next few months. They're working with Roblox's developer tools making new worlds and I'm staring over their shoulder thinking: this application is easily as complicated to use as any of the design tools I've been exposed to and these kids are just ripping through it like it's "not work" (if only they were getting paid!). I've been looking for things to motivate them to step out of the "game world" and realize that the things they're doing could be done outside of Roblox -- they could make real applications, but much like I didn't believe my dad when he handed me that book, they haven't had that "ah ha" moment, yet. [0] My friends all had Commodore 64s and such that played really cool (if slowly loading) games and cost a few hundred dollars. We had a $3,000 IBM 8088 clone with a 10MB hard drive and floppy drive that ... wasn't fun. [1] I can't remember the title completely but it was something like "Build an 80486 PC and Save A Bundle" [2] My 80486, if memory serves, cost just shy of $10,000. We went with what would be called "server hardware" these days: SCSI over (very new) IDE or (very old) MFM -- we went SCSI with a full height 360MB drive (40MB drives were huge), a very nice video card and a 18" CRT display (14" was 'normal' with anything above starting at twice the price of the best 14" display). And two modems... I ran a multi-node BBS on custom software originally based on Telegard.