Antarctica Starts Here.

Getting laid off just before the holidays has given me time to think about some things that, somewhat paradoxically, don't have anything to do with looking for a new job, doing paperwork, or worrying about insurance. Specifically it's given me time to reflect upon a conversation I had some months ago about how people relate to computers has changed in the last thirty years or so.

I'd been in a discussion about computers, how technology has changed over time, and how people have changed in how they interact with technology over the same period of time. Specifically, it involved folks - college grads, most of them - who had the weirdest blind spots any of us had seen. I'd had the same kind of experience some years ago with folks who didn't know what files were. Now, I'm not trying to turn this into an "old man yells at cloud" kind of post; that's not my intention and I hope it doesn't come off that way. What I am musing about is what folks are being exposed to in school and during their off-hours. In the context of the discussion I alluded to, my response was pretty succinct and said in all sincerity: "A computer science education is what's missing."

This is what I mean: Manuals used to be a thing. In-depth documentation of things (vis a vis, computers at home) used to be the norm. Once upon a time (when I was a kid growing up) you pretty much got the beginnings of a comp.sci education (at the 100 level (the sort of elective a freshman in college might take), if not 101 (freshman comp.sci student in college)) just by leafing through the pages. By way of example this is what manuals used to be like. (local copy) On the intro page the manual talks about arcade-style sprite graphics and how you (yes, you!) can program them yourself with just that book. A few pages after that the manual describes in detail what each of the keys do (from RETURN to RESTORE to the CRSR (up/down, left/right) keys) and how to use them. A few pages after that it teaches you how to load and save programs to and from cassette tapes and floppy disks. It told you what to do, what it meant, what to expect if it worked, and what was going on if it didn't work.

Shortly after that the book showed you (not told, showed) how to use a Commodore as a calculator if you wanted to. If computers were not something you had any experience with chances were that you did with a calculator. And then it eases you into BASIC if you keep going. Elementary logic like IF..THEN decisions and greater than/less than/equal to/not equal to comparisons. Doing things a number of times with FOR..NEXT loops. And a couple of pages after that the manual demonstrates in a handful of lines of text (which you can type in or not as you will), in simple words (not technical jargon) how to do basic animation by moving characters around. Then how to prompt the user for input and what to do with it. In the next chapter, more graphics, only they're a bit more complicated. Then how to program simple music and sound effects, roughly equivalent to poking at a piano with a pamphlet in front of you. All of this stuff used the Commodore BASIC programming language built into the firmware.

All of this knowledge came with the manual, a spiral bound book less than 200 pages long which accompanied every C64. You didn't have to buy other books to learn how to do anything (though you could if you wanted to). You didn't have to hunt around at the local library to find a programmers' handbook (local copy) (though you could if you wanted to). This was, if you'll pardon the term, 101 level stuff. You bought a computer and you got an introduction to computer science course for free along with it. You didn't have to go to a store and drop an unexpected amount of money on a programmming language ¹ because you had a useful, featureful programming language that you could learn at your own pace if you wanted to. Even if you didn't become a coder it still gave you an introductory understanding of how computers work and what you can do with them, and that, I think, had a great deal to do with how computer technology took off in the 1980's.

Of course, I can only speak to my experience - I had a Commmodore growing up. I am vaguely aware that the Apple II had something similar, and have no idea what the Macintosh computers of the time had in the way of what came out of the box with the unit. The Atari 8-bits (which I got into when I was in high school) were similiar in many respects to the Commodore 8-bits, from the detailed documentation to the built-in BASIC interpreter. ² The IBM PCs of the time (the XT and AT) had (I've read) BASIC in chip ROM but I've ony ever seen GWBASIC.EXE and BASICA.COM which came with DOS, also for free.

The point I'm trying to make is this: Documentation is largely a joke these days, an afterthought at best. Manuals - actual technical information - are something you don't get with the hardware anymore, and finding them sometimes requires a quest worthy of Indiana Jones. Once people could tinker with their computers - see what they were capable of and discover what they as users could do. The resources were there because they came with the machine. At some point, maybe late in the 1980's or early in the 1990's that changed. Documentation got skinnier and skinnier, the page margins larger and larger, and the amount of information smaller and smaller. It wouldn't surprise me if people had Opinions about this, some of them informed, most of them not. I think all I'm qualified to say on the topic is this: Where once the curious could find answers to their questions with very little effort, many people don't seem to know that there are questions that can be asked anymore. And web search going to hell in a handbasket doesn't help matters any.

Or maybe, and I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the possibility, it's always been this way. For starters, I was a kid at that time. I got my C64 at the age of five. This means that my exposure to lots of things was inherently limited by where my folks took me, what they could afford, and what they were willing to expose me to. ³ Additionally, the usefulness of documentation or lack thereof is irrelevant in some respects because not everybody is innately curious about computers (which is a given that isn't brought up often enough). The case can be made that folks who aren't all that inclined to treat a manual as anything more than a reference for a handy tool didn't simply because they're not inclined to become computer nerds, so they don't need anything more detailed than that. Not everybody is. Just like not everybody is inclined to be a gearhead who can tear down and rebuild an engine in a weekend for fun. And that's okay! Everybody is different, with different innate strengths and interests.

Maybe it's worth a study, if there's still room in the world for such things.