> I consider swaths of modern hackers who simply don't know about much of ASCII as evidence of babysteps towards computers maturing as a technology.
Nobody else has argued on this point yet so I'll throw my 2¢ in. (An aside: I had to look up the codepoint for ¢ - 2A - so I could use it. I haven't memorized ASCII yet, let alone Unicode.)
In my opinion, things like the first 31 characters of ASCII, line discipline, NIC PHY AUIs, the difference between RS-232 (point-to-point) vs RS-485 (current-loop), how to make your Classic Mac show a photo of the developer team (hit the Interrupt key then input "G 41D89A"), or how to play notes on period VT100s (set the keyboard repeat rate really high); we've moved into an era where Web stacks reveal hard-to-diagnose bugs in nearly-40-year-old runtimes (Erlang), Apple will give you $200k if you extract the Secure Boot ROM out of your iPhone (in one person's case via a bespoke tool that attached to the board and talked PCIe), the UEFI in Intel NUCs is such a close match for the open-source BSP that Intel releases that it's a lot easier than everyone would like for you to make UEFI modules that step on things that shouldn't be step-on-able and let you fall through holes into SMM (Ring -2), and few people care that sudo on macOS doesn't really give you root-level privileges anymore.
We've just replaced all the old idiosyncrasies with a bunch of more modern idio[syn]crasies. You're right that technology has matured, but this has unfortunately meant that a lot of the innocence we took for granted has been lost. Things aren't an absolute disaster, but it's more political now, and we have to keep on our toes. Computers aren't universally somewhere we can go to to have fun; we have to work to find the fun now.
(Also, I just did that thing I often do with forums - I expect my reply to appear at the end of the thread, so I go to click on the reply button at the end. But that would reply to the comment at the end of the thread, not yours. This is a problem endemic to forum UI and not a HN issue. Not all aspects of computers have matured yet, not by a long shot.)
Nobody else has argued on this point yet so I'll throw my 2¢ in. (An aside: I had to look up the codepoint for ¢ - 2A - so I could use it. I haven't memorized ASCII yet, let alone Unicode.)
In my opinion, things like the first 31 characters of ASCII, line discipline, NIC PHY AUIs, the difference between RS-232 (point-to-point) vs RS-485 (current-loop), how to make your Classic Mac show a photo of the developer team (hit the Interrupt key then input "G 41D89A"), or how to play notes on period VT100s (set the keyboard repeat rate really high); we've moved into an era where Web stacks reveal hard-to-diagnose bugs in nearly-40-year-old runtimes (Erlang), Apple will give you $200k if you extract the Secure Boot ROM out of your iPhone (in one person's case via a bespoke tool that attached to the board and talked PCIe), the UEFI in Intel NUCs is such a close match for the open-source BSP that Intel releases that it's a lot easier than everyone would like for you to make UEFI modules that step on things that shouldn't be step-on-able and let you fall through holes into SMM (Ring -2), and few people care that sudo on macOS doesn't really give you root-level privileges anymore.
We've just replaced all the old idiosyncrasies with a bunch of more modern idio[syn]crasies. You're right that technology has matured, but this has unfortunately meant that a lot of the innocence we took for granted has been lost. Things aren't an absolute disaster, but it's more political now, and we have to keep on our toes. Computers aren't universally somewhere we can go to to have fun; we have to work to find the fun now.
(Also, I just did that thing I often do with forums - I expect my reply to appear at the end of the thread, so I go to click on the reply button at the end. But that would reply to the comment at the end of the thread, not yours. This is a problem endemic to forum UI and not a HN issue. Not all aspects of computers have matured yet, not by a long shot.)