And it's little brother, autoexec.bat! The thing I found most bemusing through all of this is people insisting that people growing up with tech would somehow have this deep intuitive understanding of it. It made no sense. Using tech doesn't somehow make you aware of how it works. If anything, the refined final product can end up hiding it from people.
We all use elevators but know basically nothing about them -- hence the countless nonsense Hollywood scenes with a cut elevator cable (spoiler: you'd be fine). By contrast when they were first being introduced, every single person that rode on an elevator was probably quit well aware of the tension brake systems and other redundancies - because otherwise, stepping foot in one would feel insane. But when you grow up with them and take everything for granted, hey who cares - it works, yeah?
People growing up with personal computers did get that intuitive understanding for the most part. The problem is that zoomers and gen alpha are now growing up with idiot proofed appliances that hide all the details from them instead.
I'd argue a bigger part is the endless entertainment. A big part of the reason I started tinkering with things is because I was bored, and I'm fairly certain that was a very common motivator.
At Half Price Books I picked up a book on assembler and started writing my first code using debug.com simply because of boredom. In an era where I could have instead been watching endless entertaining videos on any subject imaginable, or playing literally free video games optimized for thousands of hours of entertainment? I'd certainly have never been bored, and I'm not sure I'd have ever even gotten into computers (or anything for that matter). Indeed a disproportionately large number of zoomers seem to have no skills whatsoever, and that's going to be a major issue for humanity moving forward.
We all use elevators but know basically nothing about them -- hence the countless nonsense Hollywood scenes with a cut elevator cable (spoiler: you'd be fine). By contrast when they were first being introduced, every single person that rode on an elevator was probably quit well aware of the tension brake systems and other redundancies - because otherwise, stepping foot in one would feel insane. But when you grow up with them and take everything for granted, hey who cares - it works, yeah?