When I became a Geek

David Braben has an opinion piece on the BBC today as they celebrate the legacy of the BBC Micro. My family never actually owned a BBC Micro, although we did own several other esoteric machines which came with the premise that the main activity anyone owning one would be to tinker and play with it, including program it. A lot of what I learnt about computing was by entering listings and figuring out why things did what they did. Together with the demo coding me and my friends on the ST these machines gave me a fantastic grounding in the way computers actually work which has served me well in my career to date. I've had many pub conversations with colleges where the knowledge graduates today have about the nuts and bolts of computing has been debated. These days the ability to program a new PC is so far down the list of priorities of anyone buying one I wonder if we are damaging the future of computer science?