Ah, nice short story, similar to mine. I did a lot of XP reinstalling myself. Before that I was a full time autoexe.bat hacker.<p>The computers we got were always expensive though, I don't know what our 386 cost, but our pentium mmx 150 MHz was the equivalent of 1500 euro's. I wasn't allowed to open it.<p>Imagine how thrilled I am with current day Raspberry Pi's! I tell my kids they can do whatever they want with them! I got a second hand pretty good HP business model laptop, put Ubuntu on it, made accounts for the kids. I tell them they have to figure stuff out themselves. The thing can do so much!
But it just isn't the same to them it seems.<p>Maybe the magic, the newness, the expensiveness was part of the appeal for me, maybe the kids are just swamped in compute power and touchscreens from birth, it's too normal. Maybe my kids just aren't nerds like me. I don't know. I gave up the pushing, instead I focus on them getting things done and working themselves. They have the time to figure stuff out, even if they are almost dying to see the next (animated) episode of Lassie on Netflix (what a dog, animated or not)...<p>I remember a blog being posted here on HN where a fellow hacker did all of the tech for his family (a natural instinct), and he created a bunch of digital illiterates as a results. I'm trying to not fall for that trap at the very least.
I've tried to get my kids into tinkering with computers by showing them how to write Python code (with Thonny) and installing lots of programs for drawing etc.<p>They are curious, and they do tinker with stuff when I'm there, but about 10 minutes after I leave the room they'll find a way to watch cartoons.<p>Somehow the internet has become this huge distraction and mostly just a replacement for a TV. I kinda miss what it was like in the 1990ies and early 2000s.
* One such trick was the restart DoS attack. It’s simple really.<p>shutdown /r /m \\IPAddress /t 0 *<p>Today in schools, this would sadly get you expelled for "computer network hacking".
Similiar experience growing up. Very very exciting and memorable times indeed.<p>Using nlite with xp sp3 to make 256mb sd ram usable with out needing to reinstall the os every few weeks was the challenge.<p>Also, trying out Ubuntu through free Linux cd shipped from somewhere in the world was literally the most exciting experience of 8th grade.
I kinda relived parts of my own childhood with the story. Funnily written for childhood memoirs :)<p>In my case the magical Windows version was Windows 95 Final Beta (AKA Chicago), which I managed to get through my fathers connections. Oh boy it was exciting for a fouth-grader to install it and figure out what went wrong etc.<p>(Although I strongly was in the OS/2 and Mac camps at the time;-)
This reminds my childhood computer stories and how I got into using Linux in 10th grade. My parents installed the K9 Website blocker on Windows which was (is?) a pretty strong domain blocking tool. Let alone anything NSFW, Youtube and Facebook were blocked too! I learned a bit about dual booting online and with a freshly burned CD of Ubuntu 12.04, I was determined not to screw things up. I was pretty happy I installed Ubuntu safely and it was a relief to find that the parental website blockers of Windows had no equivalents on Ubuntu. I often think that I probably wouldn't have had a headstart on using Linux and programming had it not been for wanting to circumvent website blocking tools.
When I was 10, I painted all the light on my computer case black with watercolor so I can keep it running to download Mandrake linux without my mom noticing —- it would take more than a day to download with a 56kbps connection. Somehow she did find out in just a few hours, may be I should ask her how :-)<p>I also had the windows key memorized just like the author does. But it was windows 98, and I can’t recall it now. I think the last time I tried to write it out was when I was around 18, so the key lasted at least 10 years in my memory