The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child
This passage from the synopsis made me stop and think:<p>&gt; they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves<p>I was a technically precocious boy; I got my start on Apple II computers in the late 80s. I think it&#x27;s common for nerds of my generation to look at newer computers, particularly mobile devices, and worry that they&#x27;re robbing future generations of what we had in our childhood -- a computer that gave us an open, kind of hard-to-miss invitation to tinker, learn to program, and go as deep into the software stack as we wanted to go (it wasn&#x27;t actually that deep on those old computers).<p>I&#x27;m tempted to think that I wasn&#x27;t actually that special as a kid, and if newer computers were designed for technically precocious kids, there might be more such kids in future generations. But then, in my family with two brothers and a sister, I clearly was the only computer nerd. And I think it&#x27;s likely that my siblings (and especially my mother, who was using a computer for real work) were happier with later computers than they were with our first Apple IIGS. So while I admit I was initially indignant at the quote above, I can see why it was actually pointing out a real problem.