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Yeah, that would be great, but I don't see it happening. In 1982, little geeks like me wanted to spend time playing with their computers, but there was almost nothing you could do with them, so you /had/ to become a hacker to have any fun. And the hardware was more accessible. We wrote code in real mode with no protections, and the peripherals were simpler. I wrote my own banner printer when I learned I could control the pins of my dot matrix printer individually. Now you have to learn postscript or something comparable just print "Hello World," or you have to write a kernel driver to talk to the thing directly.

The bar to get the machine to do interesting things is too high, and the distractions are too many. You can spend weeks with your computer without running out of websites to explore.

P.S. If anyone does figure this out, please be sure not to implant damage that must be undone later. The mental leap from line-numbered BASIC to structured programming was a big one.




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