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I quite like this thread by @jgoerzen about the psychological harm of locked down computers: https://floss.social/@jgoerzen/110327999622439388
It's a good read, and there is a great deal of truth in it.
I do have a quibble however: while I didn't do any programming in the 1980s, my recollection is that in that particular era, if you wanted to do anything really interesting with your computer you needed to *buy a programming language*.
I think a lot of things in computing have gotten a lot worse. I've had the horrifying experience of teaching college students who didn't know how to use a file system. But aside from an *extremely* small population of elites, I don't think the experience of 1980s computer users was one of infinite potential.
If I were to attach that user experience to an era, I would put it a bit later, in the late 1990s and in the 2000s, after Linux had taken off, and languages like Python began to emerge.
There was a brief window in the mid 2000s when it felt like computers might be democratized. Some countries were using Ubuntu for government computers. Corporate operating systems still existed, but free operating systems had matured into real competitors, if only the marketing could have been better.
Smart phones changed everything, by giving regular users a product that open source wasn't ready to compete with.
Then again, against the dystopian nightmare of a corporate-owned internet, here we having conversations on open source federated social media, something that I would have thought would never take off at any kind of meaningful scale in, say, 2015.
Hmm.
@dynamic You are quite right that, BASIC aside, most compilers were pay-for before the ascent of Linux. I previously mentioned @driscoll 's fantastic book "Modem World" about the #BBS as a social network, and @textfiles 's excellent BBS Documentary. People created thriving communities in the 80s and 90s using computers. Last year, I mentioned the high cost of computing back then at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10417-the-pc-internet-revolution-in-rural-america . Indeed, there were barriers. But... 1/
@dynamic My first computer, a TRS-80 CoCo II, came with a manual that was largely concerned with teaching readers about computers and writing programs in BASIC. Yes, computers and software were expensive back then, but "you can do anything with this platform" was a feature.
It is good that things are cheaper and you don't have to be interested in programming to use a computer now.
But today's message isn't "anyone can learn to program!" but "you can't be trusted to program your device." /end
Replying to both of you together because I think your replies largely overlap thematically. I think you're right: the very first personal computers were much more geared toward knowing how to use your computer to do absolutely anything than computers and "devices" that came later.
I do think that levels of user empowerment have come in waves, though, which I think is kind of interesting.
I guess the first personal computers were BASIC based, although I don't really remember them (though my elementary school did have computer lab with some *very* fancy Apple II-e computers).
Then came GUI based systems, with Apple both leading the way and more heavily locked down.
But later, Linux started to take hold and eventually Apple did the unthinkable and switched to a Unix-based OS.
Next came iPads, smart phones, and Chromebooks. A return to the "hood-welded shut" model for Apple combined with questions of---forget software---why would user would even want to own their own data?
But most recently there's been another shift back toward empowerment: encrypted protocols (Signal), federated social media, the rise of Frame.Work laptops engineered to be user-serviceable.