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Kids, Computers And Authority
Spasemunki writes: "This link showed up on Ars Technica the other day. It's an article on Brill's Content on the sociological impact of a society where the younger generation has all the technical know-how, and parents are left to seek the advice of their kids on how to keep things running. It discusses patterns in computer use and knowledge, and the rising economic and social power of the young and computer saavy. Includes some words from Shawn Fanning of Napster fame."
To make a short story longer...
When I was in sixth grade, my school got its first computer, as Apple ][ (Pac Bell, black case). I was really fascinated by it. The library had one book about the computer, which was hand written, about very simple programming in BASIC. The last several pages covered the advanced topic of FOR loops, but only briefly. Whoever wrote the thing obviously stopped abruptly, but it was a start. The librarian said they didn't have any other books, and of course she was the only person at among the staff that "knew about the computer", which consisted of how to boot the computer and run the Oregon Trial game.
It didn't take long to go through the hand written book. One other guy, Will, also was really interested in the computer and read it all. There was a guy named Adam who was an expert and seemed to know everything about the machine. It turned out he had one at home. He was in 8th grade, and usually didn't want to help me and Will much. To me and Will, Adam didn't just have power and authority, he was a god, but nobody else, neither kids nor adults cared much about him.
One day I got to talk with Adam (who was working on a simple text-adventure to model an AD&D adventure module), and I asked him how he learned all this stuff that wasn't in the hand written book. He told me about the applesoft basic manual that came with his computer. He said the library had the book in the back room. The librarian lied to me... they did have another book, but they considered it part of the expensive computer equipment and not something they could check out or even let anyone read in the library. After all, we were just kids! The environment wasn't anything like what's described in the Brill's Content article.
That book was the first thing I ever stole in my life!
I started going to bed earlier, and I had a small light in my room. I'd spend all night reading the manual, and writing basic programs on paper. Time with the computer was very limited, and they had a strong policy to be fair to everyone, which meant giving everyone equal time slices to play Oregon Trial. I rarely had time to type more than a couple dozen lines in a session, and it was usually hard to remember what the code was supposed to be about. To make matters worse, Will got to the DOS (Apple DOS 3.3, long before the PC computer) manual, so access to the disk would have to wait for another couple years. Some parts of the applesoft manual, particularily the GOSUB, were "try this... now you see what it does". I couldn't possibly bring the stolen book back to the school and use it in front of the computer, so it took a very long time to really learn most of the material.
Still, it was great fun, to be able to create programs. I had been interested in electronics... I had a bunch of the kits from radio shack, with the scrings for connecting the wires. Electronic projects were frustrating, because I didn't have the parts and I didn't ever have money to buy them. With the computer, all I needed was my 5 1/4 inch floppy disk, and lingering around trying to get some time on the school's only computer.
The next year Will and I were the experts about the computer, but we really didn't end up being in a position of any authority, because for the most part nobody really needed to know anything, and "knowing how to use the computer" involved being able to boot up, type CATALOG, and RUN a basic program... almost always Oregon Trial.
In 8th grade, the school district was re-zoned, and I ended up at a much larger school, which had about 8 computers instead of one. I could almost always get time on a machine. They also had the newer Apple ][e, and they had lots of copies of the manuals, including the DOS manual the Will grabbed a couple years earlier. The larger school also had a "activity bus", intended for sports, so I could stay after school for nearly two hours and get some real time on the computer. With all the manuals, lots of time on the computer, and not having the hide the stolen property, I started really getting pretty good at writing code. Will was zoned to a different school, so I was certainly the only guru, but it really didn't matter. Only a couple other students were really interested in the computers, and they were always nervous about being a nerd. I was already there, and while it sucked, I more or less learned to brush off insults and hostility from my classmates. Back then, it was seriously uncool to be interested in computers.
Late in the 8th grade year, there was a science fair, and because computers were going to be the "next big thing", they had a computer science category. The school brought in some actual programmers, because it was well known that the one teacher who had the one and only (lame) computer class knew far less than I did, and was probably less knowledgable than some of the others as well. My little program was a tiny stats program, as I recall for track teams, simple stats for each runner per event. It loaded and saved data to the disk, had menus, data entry screens, on-screen data table display and some simple reports that went to the printer. I won the contest, and somewhere in the evening my folks talked with the programmers and they convinced my parents to buy me a computer.
I spent a lot of time with the computer... a lot of time. I finally had all night sessions in front of a real computer. My parents were concerned that I spent too much time with it. I spent a lot of time playing games, but also a lot of time coding. Like most other kids at the time, I spent a lot of time copying programs. It wasn't until much later that my parents got the clue that I really was knowledgable about programming, for a long time all their thoughts revolved around how much time I was spending on the computer. Of course, they never needed and certainly didn't want to use the computer, so they never needed any advise and never even had an opportunity to see what I could do.
High school wasn't much more accepting of being a geek, but there were more of us, and there were a bunch of people who were indifferent, so it was much easier to avoid hostility. Like before, there was one teacher that knew about computers, but much less than I did. Over those years I learned a lot, and I wrote a really nice database program, with bits of 6502 asm code, which was mainly used to track a collection of copied disks.
One summer my folks arranged for a special class about interfacing hardware to the computer... and it was a great experience. The instructor really knew a lot about both software and hardware, and the other guys (no girls) in the class were guys just like me. One guy was a master as asm code, and I learned several tricks, a couple others really knew quite a bit about electronics. I think I was the only guy without a modem. Every day at lunch they'd all talk about various BBSs. I got a printed list of phone numbers from one of them. The hardware portion of the class was a bit over my head, and it slowly sank in over last two years of high school. Like me, they were certainly gurus at versious technical subjects, but these relationships or authority that teen gurus experience today just didn't happen, mostly because adults generally didn't need to use computers and so they didn't need help.
After that summer, I had to get a modem. My folks were terrified that I'd break into banks, and they'd read some lame articles about "profiles" of hackers (I wonder it Katz it reading). It was nearly a year until I finally got a modem. A friend of mine got a 1200 baud modem, so he loaned me his old 300 baud.
Getting onto BBSs was great, and I spent lots and lots of time on-line, reading and posting in boards, and exchanging email. I met lots of people, all in the local area. The computer teacher at my school was intersted in these user groups, and together with a couple other students, we ended up going to lots of user group meetings. It all seemed very natural, and I didn't even realize I was staying out until 11pm or midnight until my parents expressed their concerns. By that time I'd learned most of the things there were to know about applesoft basic, 6502 asm, and the internals of DOS 3.3. There were some other kids, but it was really cool meeting with other geeks. Some of those times were the first times I was a guru, AND someone was actually interested. I had learned quite a few tricks to defeat the floppy-based copy protection schemes, and there were always plenty of people who really, really wanted to hear tips and tricks they didn't already know. The position of authority, though, was only with other hard-core geeks... never in my family.
In my last year of high school (1988), the school got a bunch of macintosh computers. For reasons I don't recall, a number of teachers were using them for various things, and while I quickly learned about mac (resedit, et all), there was another student who knew a lot more, and he basically took over a sys-admin role for the one server they had in the building. That was probably the first time I saw this whole teen guru thing in real action. He really did command some real authority with teachers and admin types, because he more or less controlled the network (localtalk) and was the only one who knew how to fix most of the conmputer problems.
Well, I finally got out of high school, moved to college, away from my parents, and into, for the first time in my life, into an environment where is was "ok" to be myself (a true geek, I suppose). Things have only gotten better and better every year since then, and every year it seems that more and more people need the services of geeks like me, fortunately including employers.
Now I'm an authority on many subjects technical, sometimes because I really know something, other times because non-technical people don't know any better. I'm certainly not a teenager anymore (currently 30), and now even my parents have to use computers, which I fix for them.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools