I'm 25. Maybe I was born in a conservative family on spending but I would have to seriously push my parents for weeks to obtain $60 worth of something as abstract as a SDK (like they even know what it is...)!
And for families that live check after check, they often have a computer but affording a $100 license can be very painful, I was in that situation!
true , but it's only recently that there has been so much good development software available for free.
I absolutely disagree. When I was 12 (in 1994) I became interested in Linux because it had so many development tools available. I thought computers and programs were magical, and Linux/bash/Perl/gcc et al. made it possible for me to learn programming. And Slackware Linux could be obtained for 10 guilders or less.
My generation became hackers through GNU and Linux, just as the generation before used MSX, C64, or a ZX machine with a free BASIC interpreter.
IMO, the sickening development is not so much that Mac and iOS developer accounts cost $99 per year. It's that the world (Apple and Microsoft) is slowly moving to a model where there is a gatekeeper who decides what gets in and what does not. As a bonus the gatekeeper gets 30% of every purchase. I can sympathize with the need to provide a 'trusted' source of software, but it should also be possible to install whatever the heck you like.
What would the Internet be if it followed this model?
I hadn't used Linux in 1994, my first experiences with it were ~1998 but I remember that getting it to install and work correctly with my hardware as well as getting X to work was no mean feat.
So I imagine that would have been quite a large hurdle for somebody with a casual interest in learning to program to jump through in 1994, I also remember paying somewhere in the region of $100 for my Linux distribution then (SUSE I think).
Even at the point you had installed it , you would be compiling binaries with GCC that would have targetted Linux/glibc etc so you wouldn't have been able to share many of your creations with the rest of world apart from a slim minority of Linux users.
I'm not sure what the best compromise between having a "trusted" source of software is and being able to install what you want.
Most people seem quite happy with the app store lock-in, in fact most people I know who own android devices are not even aware of it's sideloading feature, they just get stuff from android market.
Of course if Apple become over restrictive then they do risk damaging their own ecosystem to the benefit of competing platforms.
Unfortunately there does seem to be more popular support that I had previously expected for the Internet to develop something closer to this model. I recently watched a documentary on cyber-bullying in which groups of parents were calling for an authority from government to be able to control the content of social networking websites as well as remove any anonymity from the Internet.
I hadn't used Linux in 1994, my first experiences with it were ~1998 but I remember that getting it to install and work correctly with my hardware as well as getting X to work was no mean feat.
X was no worry - our machine only had 4 MB of RAM, so I was practically forced to use pseudo-terminals. The learning curve for Linux distributions was not that steep. Slackware, especially in those days, was orders of magnitude less complex than current distributions. I picked up a cheap bargain UNIX book, which was enough to get started.
Even at the point you had installed it , you would be compiling binaries with GCC that would have targetted Linux/glibc etc so you wouldn't have been able to share many of your creations
Well, sharing my creations with the world wasn't very much possible anyway, since we had no internet connection. Besides that, for me the magic was in creating a program.
Besides that, your comment is factually incorrect, since a DOS port of gcc was fairly quickly available (DJGPP). In fact, IIRC Id Software's Quake was later compiled with it.
I'm not sure what the best compromise between having a "trusted" source of software is and being able to install what you want.
Me neither. I see how it is beneficial for some family members and friends to have a controlled software ecosystem. Also, App stores improved usability a lot.
On the other hand, if kids only get their hands on devices that are controlled completely by corporations, how will the next generation of hackers learn?
I imagine virtual machines, both cloud and local will become a commodity at that point so whilst they may not be taking their iPad apart or replacing the software it could potentially provide a dumb terminal to an infrastructure of disposable Linux instances all loaded with state of the art FOSS.
I can see them doing things like building mashups of their social data and possibly using the next generation of arduino like devices to create real world interfaces.
They will still "hack" just their building blocks will be different. Hell in the 70s you probably weren't a real hacker if you weren't a whizz with a soldering iron, how many of the RoR type hackers today practice that?
It's really weird to hear someone say that - because I grew up in the 80s with a computer that had a commercial-quality (for the time) assembler built-in! Sure you could buy Pascal or Lisp too, but out-of-the-box you got the same tools the pros were using, and all the documentation with it too.
Well truthfully my first computer (an Acorn BBC) had a BASIC interpreter built in, I think you could also do some assembler out of the box although I never tried that at the time.
Even my first DOS PC had QBasic pre installed but it had no ability to make .EXE files which was what you needed to be able to do if you wanted to submit your software to shareware libraries.
It seems at that point that Microsoft wanted a devide between "toy" programming languages like QBASIC and "professional" ones like Visual Basic which cost money.
If you wanted to create "proper" windows software you needed to fork out some cash.
Contrast that with now where you can download Visual Studio Express along with all documentation, compilers etc for free as well as a whole load of open source languages and libraries.
I now make my living as a programmer and I use almost no commercial tools at all, I doubt many people were doing such a thing in ~1993
And for families that live check after check, they often have a computer but affording a $100 license can be very painful, I was in that situation!