Il tumbleblog di NumeroZero.
I mostly agree with Mark Pilgrim and his beautiful piece about how computers, back in the days, used to fuel any kind of interest and ultimately led lots of people, like me and like Mark himself, from a mere hobby into a true passion and then eventually into a profession.
But it isn’t Apple and its iPad that’s actually killing tinkering.
The first time tinkering was killed happened long ago, and happened as soon as Windows and its graphical user interface reached the mass.
You know, back in the days with home and personal computers you could only do a finite amount of things. Their beauty relied in the fact that, after you were done with the small library of software provided you were actually encouraged, by either boredom or curiosity, to use that goddam command line.
Back in the days, any computer I’ve tinkered with came with its own programming enviroment. My first computer was a Commodore 16 that my parents bought me as a Xmas present in 1985. Once I played all the games I had, once I tried the few applications it came with (I remember a goddam biorhythm application), I had to start typing Basic. There was nothing else to do. That was my only choice.
So, the thing is, as soon as Windows came by, people lost interest in these kind of things. There was no programming environment on those machines, nothing to screw with. When you were bored you just launched Solitaire, not Pascal (it was sold separately). Computers became easy. Just a thing to use.
That lasted for a few years and should probably be true today had not the Internet happened. You see, the Internet changed everything and brought tinkering back. The need of expressing yourself, the need of finding an audience, the challenge of publishing, inventing, sharing brought back that will to reach a sense of wonder inside machines.
So, sure, the iPad will probably be the machine for people who just want to use a computer and don’t worry about optimization, file system, software updates and programming Basic. I think about my dad. For everyone else willing to tinker, there are plenty of alternatives. Just fire up your browser and download the latest Ruby binaries.
