The Angry Drunk

Inevitably, amongst the rest of the inane wail­ing about the iPad in the last 48 hours, the old “closed sys­tem” meme has reared its tired head. The par­tic­u­lar form of that meme that I want to focus on is a par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing vari­ant and one that is best expressed by Alex Payne in his blog post On the iPad. In yon­der post Alex makes the assertion:

The thing that both­ers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real com­puter as a kid, I’d never be a pro­gram­mer today. I’d never have had the abil­ity to run what­ever stu­pid, poten­tially harm­ful, hugely edu­ca­tional pro­grams I could down­load or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tin­ker on the com­puter at all hours with­out wak­ing my par­ents. The iPad may be a boon to tra­di­tional educ­tion, inso­far as it allows for mul­ti­me­dia text­books and such, but in its cur­rent form, it’s a detri­ment to the sort of hacker cul­ture that has pro­pelled the dig­i­tal economy.

Perhaps, but let me counter with a bit of my own his­tory. My first computer

Continue read­ing iPads, “Hackers” and the Death of Computing