The internet is also full of distractions. There's a risk that the stimulation-rich environment will reduce the level of boredom that can instigate creativity, as I know it did for me - I had an out of date Commodore 64 (until I fried one of its chips) followed by an out of date Amstrad CPC464, with no software so I had to write my own.
Bingo. I'd summer at a farm where the only fun electronic item was a TRS-80. Apart from running outside or feeding the animals, that was my main entertainment. I spent hours writing adventure games for my cousins to play. Same, later on, in school, with TI calculators.
But my kids? Despite being "digital natives" don't even really know how to use computers. (Yes my failure as a parent, but also indicative of the environment.)
I think there's another thing "different" now vs the 80s/90s: The decline of good computer magazines, and despite places like hn, the relative scarcity of good technical resources to replace them. No Byte, No Dr. Dobbs, and while there are still a couple of magazines dedicated to Linux, I find their quality versus the magazines for the Amiga is a bit uneven.
Personally I grew up reading Dr. Dobbs, Byte Magazine, a slew of Amiga journals and Scientific American. I probably started reading the latter at a point where I understood maybe 40% - but it was a great way to learn English.
On the plus side, you can now go and play with and read the code from the likes of Bernstein, Percival, Torvalds and things like the entire Solaris system. And there are great resources, like the Arch Linux wiki, the FreeBSD documentation and dev/user lists. But the good stuff is increasingly hard to discover in an ocean of mediocre stuff. And I have yet to find any good canonical resource for "the good stuff". One of my biggest disappointments with college was that academics appear to be doing a terrible job of keeping up to date, or helping students seek out good extracurricular resources, despite the fact that these resources keep growing and growing.
I hope that the trend toward open publishing of research will continue, and maybe see some sister-resources in the form of free popular science resources pop up -- I could easy imagine universities and research institution pooling resources in order to help researcher edit and publish popular science articles in addition to their standard papers -- as a combination of general science education, and to rise awareness/advertise research.
I was thinking more along the lines of a meta-resource, ie: a site that publishes articles, reviews and notes on new books and projects. LWN.net is one such resource.
I do think it's important to point out that there are a lot of open books out there, facilitated by the web, like the haskell-book. But there's always been good books, it's not enough with out good librarians.
My first set of magazines were the Input series, a British monthly magazine about coding for 8-bit systems.
I invested the majority of my allowance in such magazines, "The C User's Journal" (later C/C++ User's Journal), Dr. Dobbs, PC Techniques, GDC Mag and lots of books.
Luckily my university being highly focused in systems programming, had a huge collection of books and SIGPLAN papers, which opened my eyes for the world of safe systems programming. Thanks to it I was able to delve into the work from Xerox PARC and ETHZ, as well as, the research that was happening with ML (Caml Light was rather new back then) and Prolog.
I had exactly the same start, with the Input series. It's thanks to that magazine that I even learned about assembly language programming, which although extremely low level and in many ways arcane opened the doors to understanding so many more things about a computer system.
I'm really worried about this. Not only as far as it impacts computer skills but everything.
I watched a stand-up piece/talk by Stephen Fry and he described how he read the complete works by Oscar Wilde when he was 14. Some books multiple times. I'm afraid that the odds of a 14 year old child will do that have gone down dramatically because of the informational and stimulation overload we are under today. "Smart devices" in particular I believe to be more of a curse than a blessing. I've been trying to limit my use of it and it's been great. Of course it doesn't always work, like right now.
