> Those of you who are Gen X and grew up with parents who bought you computers at a young age, you are so fortunate.
Indeed it was a golden age, when microarchitectures could really be grokked in their fullness by teenagers.
The C64 user manual was like a goldmine for me. I don't know how many supplementary materials I used (I read Compute!'s Gazette a lot) and I had already owned a VIC-20. By the time my IBM PC came along, I knew the C64 inside and out, really well. I knew the sprites subsystem and I'd programmed entire games. I knew bank switching, ROM/RAM, Kernal routines, font mapping, ASCII table, assembly and BASIC alike. I was never an electrical engineer, but I could tell you, more or less, how the 6510/6502 processed any given program and how that machine code used registers, memory, I/O, etc.
By the time I hit college I was learning Pascal and systems architecture, assembly on M68000 systems, and we were really off to the races. I was illicitly using accounts to program MU* servers and learning C, gdb, Unix. I could install and configure software and really got noticed, in my first job, for basically becoming a "shadow Unix admin" who got stuff done.
Sadly I never had the chops to be an actual IT professional or have a career. All of that knowledge and talent could've landed a career and a very stable lifestyle for someone else, but for me it was sort of an albatross. My aspirations to a corporate office job as a knowledge worker, weren't in line with what I could actually sustain.
But indeed they were golden years. I don't regret getting to know computers like that. I just wish that they had stayed as pets, rather than enslaving us like today.
Indeed it was a golden age, when microarchitectures could really be grokked in their fullness by teenagers.
The C64 user manual was like a goldmine for me. I don't know how many supplementary materials I used (I read Compute!'s Gazette a lot) and I had already owned a VIC-20. By the time my IBM PC came along, I knew the C64 inside and out, really well. I knew the sprites subsystem and I'd programmed entire games. I knew bank switching, ROM/RAM, Kernal routines, font mapping, ASCII table, assembly and BASIC alike. I was never an electrical engineer, but I could tell you, more or less, how the 6510/6502 processed any given program and how that machine code used registers, memory, I/O, etc.
By the time I hit college I was learning Pascal and systems architecture, assembly on M68000 systems, and we were really off to the races. I was illicitly using accounts to program MU* servers and learning C, gdb, Unix. I could install and configure software and really got noticed, in my first job, for basically becoming a "shadow Unix admin" who got stuff done.
Sadly I never had the chops to be an actual IT professional or have a career. All of that knowledge and talent could've landed a career and a very stable lifestyle for someone else, but for me it was sort of an albatross. My aspirations to a corporate office job as a knowledge worker, weren't in line with what I could actually sustain.
But indeed they were golden years. I don't regret getting to know computers like that. I just wish that they had stayed as pets, rather than enslaving us like today.