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This is probably a long shot, seeing as how most of this site is rather young! I was on a YouTube binge and came across some videos describing the growth of home PCs in the 1980s. It seems a lot of these devices had more a more “manual” setup, requiring people to use things like BASIC to execute commands. BASIC or other machine code could even be used to create custom computer games and stuff. There was no GUI, or visual mouse for navigation. These PCs were a lot more involved and required people to learn how to navigate them through code. With the home PC boom, it seemed a lot of schools were getting computers and actually teaching kids to program and become “tech literate” in order to learn and maintain relevant skills. To me, it seems like programming was actually a common life skill. So why didn’t this continue through the 1990s? I thought it was because the development of GUIs and the mouse made computer navigation a lot easier and abstracted a lot of the required “programming” for PC navigation. But even if the GUI and desktop facilitated a lot of things, why didn’t the pursuit of programming also keep up? It looks like programming went from being a necessity, to something that was completely overlooked due to this abstraction and I’m not sure why tech literacy declined. I feel as though back in the day, many regular people would be able to program their way around a computer. And today, it looks like programming is no longer a casual thing, but something that people pursue as a career. If you ask any random person today if they could write or read some code I’m not sure they could. Background: My first family computer was a machine running Windows 98. It was used mainly for word processing and homework. My elementary school had computers running windows 95 (eventually upgraded to 98), and we would also only use them for word processing and for learning how to touch type. I never learned programming as a kid, and I never touched a single bit of code until high school for one semester. Is that common? Or was my lack of academic coding experience just an outlier? Language Abstraction: Now I think that sure, many people could probably use ASM or BASIC back in the day, but I guess they wouldn’t really be considered programmers unless they took a serious interest in learning computer science. However, this standardized level of computer programming literacy appears to be way higher than it is today. And with today’s modern language, wouldn’t it be even easier to remain tech literate today? Even learning python in elementary school would be a useful skill to have. So why don’t we do this? Or am I just ignorant of the modern education system? Thanks in advance for anyone who replies! TC: 150k / 2 YOE / TX
It’s simple, the only people who owned personal computers before the early 90s had an enthusiast / nerd in the household. As GUIs modernized, the barrier to entry for using a computer became lower. There was a resulting massive explosion in user base of people without the INTEREST in programming. They could surf the web, play games, print things at home. That was all they wanted to do with their computer. So yes, the average user in 1990 was way more skilled. But the number of total users was minuscule by comparison. It’s like asking if people are dumber now because the Wright brothers flew in 1903, but people now don’t know anything about the physics of flying. The average person today knows way more about both airplanes and computers then the average person did when those things first became commonplace.
The barrier to entry comment makes sense. I’m not asking if people are dumber today, I’m just wondering why we didn’t continue to push general programming literacy even after this lower barrier to entry. It seems like it was generally considered a good skill to have, so to me, it would logically follow that with more people having access to computers there would be an even bigger push to standardize programming to the level of math or English. But I guess it was mainly seen as a niche skill for people to pursue.
Steve jobs made the GUI becoming a standard and then everyone else just copied! You want to blame him or thank him?
bro wut
People who had computers back then were a lot more technical by necessity. It was selection bias. Vastly more people have computers today. I came of age in then 90s, and we did have some light computer programming instruction. That thing with the turtle… anyone??
Elder millennial: I just remember DOS and when your computer started up there was maybe just a word or two you had to write that looked like code. But I certainly wasn’t coding or anything.
Thank you for paying the tax in the best format possible ❤️
LOL it makes the most sense that way 😂