Here’s something sad. Well, not sad, but certainly disheartening, at least to me. This is an example of a book that used to be prevalent in the early to late eighties. Books like this, and A. K. Dewdney’s column in Scientific American, taught children, enthusiasts, and amateurs not to fear computers, but to actively engage with them, as sort of partners in thinking or imagining.

Nowadays, how many of these kinds of books do you find? I cannot think of anything right now that would fit this niche. Most books on computers are geared either to the professional or the consumer, that is, gamers and end-users. The Idiot’s and Dummies imprints are for professionals thrown into a field in which they feel out of place. There are no mass market paperback books for computer enthusiasts. There are no perfect-bound trade paperback books under twenty dollars for the computer enthusiast either.

If a child were to look up and say, “Daddy, Mommy, computers are interesting. How do I find out more about them?”—what would you do?

As the power of our personal computers has gone up up up, have we seen a corresponding rise in amateur literature? It is painfully obvious that it has not. While there have been individual projects that have focused on the experience of learning, there have been fewer and fewer books published for the enthusiast.
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