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Philtech: What's Cool?
Sat, 06 May 2006

When my family long ago picked up a Commodore Vic-20 home computer, I was a changed boy. I'd been bugging my father to get us a Colecovision console (as I was adoring the one a kid down the street had; I am ashamed to admit that I was using that kid just so I could see this technical wizardry that was video gaming in its youth. Sorry Raj!) I remember when my father came home with the Vic: "Now you can learn to make your own games!" he proclaimed, and my life was forever changed.

In those formitive years I spent every moment devouring whatever I could get my hands on.. from the BASIC Programming Language manuals included with the device, to books acquired from the computer store after mowing the lawn for allowance (book stores didn't carry anything but 'literature' at the time), to program listings I dumpster dived for while walking to school, even listings copied down with pencil from an overhead projector at a user group meet - thats where I learned how to convert to Celsius! Later of course we obtained our beloved Atari ST computer, which got me into running and writing a BBS, demo coding and game hax0ring (again, sorry folks, I was young!), and eventually into the good stuff that finally turned me into a professional coder. (A note for history, I sold my first shareware back around 1988 or 1989 - an email (Fido echomail) client for the Atari ST!)

In short, when I was young, computers were fricking cool.

The technology, and having power over invisible 'bits', let me be who I am today. I had to have more and I've very certain every geek of my generation shares a similar experience - that lust over knowledge that at the time was just so hard to come by.

Well, nowadays, coding is blue collar work as I've ranted about before; the age of computer bookstores has come (and gone!), and the time when useful books could be had in Chapters - also gone. Its such a common profession that hundreds of thousands of us make a career in it. Everyday computer games succeed only when they include modding/scripting options - coding for the common man. Kids don't need BASIC built into a PC's ROM, since they've got Halflife 2 - the work of thousands of man hours - at their back and call for $50.

It was only natural for a lad such as I who grew up devouring technology to fall into mobile gadgets. Palm devices were cool as shiz a few years back, and today the average highschool kid has a Sony PSP or Nintendo DS. Mobile is cool. But thats cool to have, not something you lust over and want to digest.

So heres my question -- what is so damned cool nowadays? What do 10 year olds run home from school to do? What do 14 year olds sketch on their books, since I cannot think its Assembler or BASIC or Pascal like it was for me - yes, I suck. No wonder I couldn't get a date ;) Code is droll. Its a good thing that by the time my generation retires kids will head to work in their flying car and corporate billing systems using think-and-drag.

Code is what your dad does for a living.

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