Comment by eloisius
2 days ago
12-year-old me wasn’t putting my tech skills to good use enough to pay $5 every time I sat down at the computer. I was making things though, and the internet was full of tutorials, chat rooms, and other people you could learn from. I think it would be sad if the same curious kid today was told “just pay $5 and ask Claude” when pestering someone in IRC about how to write a guestbook in Perl.
12-year-old me wasn't either, but he was noodling around on a computer that cost $2500 (more like $5500 in today's dollars). I think our parents loved us very much and must have had some means to afford the capital cost of a computer back then.
I don't see my 7-year-old paying $5 for each hour he wants to program (and no way in hell would I give him my credit card), but I could easily envision paying $20/month for a Claude subscription and letting him use it. We pay more than that for Netflix & Disney+.
> noodling around on a computer that cost $2500 (more like $5500 in today's dollars)
Wow! 12-year-old me was noodling around on a computer that my dad brought home from work because it would have otherwise ended up in landfill. We had very little money for computers back then, and I was thrilled when my parents gave me a budget to buy parts to build my own from scratch when I was about to go off to college (I'd saved up a bit myself, but not nearly enough).
I think your experience is pretty privileged, and not at all common.
There's always more to the story than the Internet assumes.
We were quite possibly less privileged than you were, if your dad brought a computer home from work. I grew up with a teacher and a househusband for parents; single-income, and that income made about 1/3 of what engineers or other computer professionals made. My kid had more passport stamps at age 2 than I did at age 18.
It was $2500 because it was a Mac LC, and it was a Mac LC because that could take an Apple 2E card and run both Mac and Apple software, and that was important because my mom was a teacher and had a large library of educational software at school that she could take home. Recall that in those days, software was sold in retail stores (no Internet), and cost $50-100 for kiddie stuff, and like $400 for productivity and compilers. 25 titles and the cost of the computer paid for itself in free software. I think we used about that.
It's a matter of priorities. My parents always prioritized my education: they bought a computer, and whatever software didn't come from my mom's workplace, and any books I wanted, and paid for my college education in full. We didn't have a whole lot other than that: we didn't take a lot of vacations or plane trips (and a single plane trip would cost more than that $2500 in those days), ran our cars into the ground (my mom owned 2 cars over my entire childhood), wore hand-me-downs.
Everyone has some level of privilege. I didn't get my first PC until I was a freshman in college. I had to spend part of my college loan buying one (~$3k IIRC). Up to that point I had only played with the Apple IIc's and the few Macs they had at my high school..
Information on programming also wasn't as readily available as it is now. I used to go the book stores and use pencil and paper and copy out solutions since $50+ for a book was way more money than I could spend.
Everything today is crazy inexpensive for the value.
So what?
That sounds dismissive, and maybe it is, but I'm being serious here. What is the point of coming here and saying "when I was 12, my parents had less money than yours did when you were 12?" Privilege is relative, "common" is relative, and constantly being dragged into oppression Olympics of who has or had things slightly worse is exhausting and not conducive to conversation.
Better keep in mind that someone here almost certainly had it even worse than you when they were in elementary school, lest you go a few seconds without acknowledging your privileged upbringing, for some reason, in a conversation where it bears absolutely no relation to anything.
12-year-old me was mostly procrastinating but sometimes fired up Pascal which required me to insert a floppy disk in my 486 compaq machine for it to work. the machine was a donation from my aunt, could only run DOS.
However chatgpt or gemini free tier is more than enough for a kid to figure out how python works and build some simple software. While I have the Gemini subscription I only got it because my family drive storage was nearly full. I could've probably got by with ChatGPT free to just stop using stackoverflow.
10-year-old me was programming on a salvaged 386 that my dad got from a friend after the company they worked at went bankrupt, and left the machine as trash. Instead of Christmas gifts I asked for programming books and pitched in some of the birthday money my grandparents would give me (about US$ 2 every birthday).
Not everyone was privileged, some of us were just lucky.
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I'm extremely privileged and I had a quarter of what you did growing up. Your experience and your kids' is not typical.
12-year-old me had (or rather, my family had) a Celeron 333 MHz and a Pentium III 550 MHz, both from Gateway, because that was the sole awesome perk my dad got from working there: literally free computers, with a required number of years of employment to pay them off. In 2000, the P3 was still pretty hot shit. I dual-booted them with every Linux distro under the sun. Since we had dial-up, the only way I had those distros was from 4-H [0], which at the time in Nebraska had a partnership with University of Nebraska to do tech instruction; once a quarter, we’d drive down to a campus (usually UNL) and spend a weekend learning something (LAMP stack, hardware troubleshooting, etc.), and having a LAN party at night. Also we had free access to their (at the time) screamingly fast internet, so I would download distros and packages to try out later.
My online upbringing was very much of the RTFM variety, and I am convinced that was and is a good method to learn. It’s not like the grumpy graybeards were cruel, they just didn’t want to waste their time answering the same “how do I…” questions from noobs. If you explained what you were experiencing, what you had read, and what you had tried, they were more than happy to help out. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable approach.
[0]: https://4-h.org/