Software is plenty tinkerable now, especially with so much of it being open source. Though applications rarely are, I don't know if that was all that different back then either for most people.
edit:
I think I misunderstood your last paragraph to mean we'll need to keep low level skills available so we don't lose the knowledge. I think you actually meant that we don't currently understand what the next generation will need to know to be effective which is a fair point, though have we ever known what skills the future requires?
/edit
There are still companies producing lower level engineering work, and the world still needs it. If academia and industry can't maintain the skills needed, bigger corporations will be able to run their own internal programs in collaboration with universities to produce the talent and those people would be paid handsomely.
With open source operating systems out there I also see it as being a recorded knowledge. Something that can be re-learned from, what will one day be referred to as, Ancient Codebases.
Though applications rarely are, I don't know if that was all that different back then either for most people.
It was. Another commenter mentioned ResEdit and being able to tinker with classic Mac applications. Two things were universally true back then:
1. In a pre-internet world, the entire application had to be hackable in some fashion, even if the application's creator tried to make that difficult.
2. Most parts of an application boiled down to simple text files, simple binary layouts or compiled source code. Obfuscation, encryption or even compression all cost CPU cycles which were often too previous of a resource.
As an example, Civilization stored much of its data in *.txt files you could edit in notepad to change the strength of units, etc...
The author's piece refers to the ability to inspect web documents to see how markup works. This is an order of magnitude harder to do in mobile apps often providing the same functionality.
Comments
Software is plenty tinkerable now, especially with so much of it being open source. Though applications rarely are, I don't know if that was all that different back then either for most people.
edit: I think I misunderstood your last paragraph to mean we'll need to keep low level skills available so we don't lose the knowledge. I think you actually meant that we don't currently understand what the next generation will need to know to be effective which is a fair point, though have we ever known what skills the future requires?
/edit
There are still companies producing lower level engineering work, and the world still needs it. If academia and industry can't maintain the skills needed, bigger corporations will be able to run their own internal programs in collaboration with universities to produce the talent and those people would be paid handsomely.
With open source operating systems out there I also see it as being a recorded knowledge. Something that can be re-learned from, what will one day be referred to as, Ancient Codebases.
It was. Another commenter mentioned ResEdit and being able to tinker with classic Mac applications. Two things were universally true back then:
1. In a pre-internet world, the entire application had to be hackable in some fashion, even if the application's creator tried to make that difficult.
2. Most parts of an application boiled down to simple text files, simple binary layouts or compiled source code. Obfuscation, encryption or even compression all cost CPU cycles which were often too previous of a resource.
As an example, Civilization stored much of its data in *.txt files you could edit in notepad to change the strength of units, etc...
The author's piece refers to the ability to inspect web documents to see how markup works. This is an order of magnitude harder to do in mobile apps often providing the same functionality.