Well, not so fast. There is a certain quality to those who grew up with computers in their home of that era. We could call it being more "hardcore" or talk of The Little Coder's Predicament in today's era.
Take John Romero, who loved playing video games, but didn't have the endless quarters to play them in the arcade. So he started creating games by programming them, playing them and tweaking them endlessly. And that's where he learned game design (he was the designer of Doom and Quake).
This isn't to say that this is the "greatest generation" of technologists or something -- they were merely well-suited for what came afterwards, which was an exciting time anyway.
However, I will venture to say that those who come of age in the early years of a certain technology, art form or skill seem to have fewer limits on their creativity. When you have stood on the shoulders of giants your whole life, you are much less likely to have "ground-level" ideas. You want to program the next great MMORPG, not a game about mutant camels.
So maybe this is a poor technological environment on the average, but it could be argued that it could engender a rare sort of brilliance as well. Since it seems that there is certainly an eccentric streak at work (parenting as performance art?), that seems like a possibility.
Take John Romero, who loved playing video games, but didn't have the endless quarters to play them in the arcade. So he started creating games by programming them, playing them and tweaking them endlessly. And that's where he learned game design (he was the designer of Doom and Quake).
This isn't to say that this is the "greatest generation" of technologists or something -- they were merely well-suited for what came afterwards, which was an exciting time anyway.
However, I will venture to say that those who come of age in the early years of a certain technology, art form or skill seem to have fewer limits on their creativity. When you have stood on the shoulders of giants your whole life, you are much less likely to have "ground-level" ideas. You want to program the next great MMORPG, not a game about mutant camels.
So maybe this is a poor technological environment on the average, but it could be argued that it could engender a rare sort of brilliance as well. Since it seems that there is certainly an eccentric streak at work (parenting as performance art?), that seems like a possibility.