A decent percentage of Gen X and early millennials grew up familiar with computers. You kind of had to be, to some extent. Stuff didn’t always work smoothly or easily, so some tinkering and understanding of how things work beneath the surface was required.

We’re moving towards a future where a computer becomes just like an appliance, like a TV. Both the hardware and software will be locked down and set up to work. You just tap and press buttons to get it to do its thing.

Eventually, we may even get to the point where computers are required to be locked down “for our safety”.

If we get that far, then I can imagine those who want to build their own and have full freedom to install and customise it any way they want could be considered the very fringe/fanatical elements of society.

“Hey, you want an illegal unauthorised computer, why on earth would you need that, are you a terrorist or criminal or something?”

I hope things don’t go quite that far. But I don’t think it’s out of the question.