Comment by safety1st

I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.

The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with.

The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab and an unusually open minded computer teacher. If you demonstrated that you were dependable, he'd basically let you do whatever you want. While my school was mostly a Mac shop, I was a bit of a Microsoft shill in high school so by graduation I'd figured out how to stand up and run a Windows NT file & web server for our school newspaper. Another guy was a Linux nut and had been allowed to do something similar with RedHat for the school's drafting lab.

Inclination met opportunity, one thing led to another, and I went on to work with technology for the next 25 years of my life.

What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down. It must be a very rare school today that allows the kind of freedom we had. There is no IDE preinstalled on a phone, and even merely installing an "unapproved" app is under fire.

If for no other reason, for the sake of the kids the industry, the tools, the operating systems need to be more open. They need to be tinkerable. That's how the most motivated kids tend to learn. Our best and brightest are not being made because we've closed things down to maximize some hedge fund's ROI somewhere. The financialization of America was a grave error.