In my experience the old computer nerd communities don't do much to help get young people that would be interested into it. A lot of the discussion online mainly just consists of reminiscing about how amazing the '80s were.
Documentation is also in something of a state—the big video game consoles (NES, SNES, Genesis..) all have plenty of free, modern high quality guides teaching you how to program them from nothing, understand all the hardware, etc.. then look at the '80s computers (*especially* the Amiga) and it seems to mainly be scattered around old book scans and wiki articles assuming varying levels of pre-existing knowledge of the hardware. Strangely enough a lot of the best documentation seems to be from YouTube tutorials (I guess because you can see what they're actually doing). It sounds wrong to call it "stuck in the past" but I guess that would be the best way to describe it.
This isn't really about the scene specifically but it's somewhat related at least.
I know you can't really cause a change in an online community by complaining about it in a hacker news comment but i do think if someone savvy with the amiga wrote a guide in that style (with things like "We press build, open the rom, and wow! We have a bouncing box on the screen!") it might start the ball rolling. Would love to see it either way.
I guess part of the reason was that the consoles never had public development kits or manuals, so when the homebrew scene emerged they had to bootstrap themselves (and in the process usually created better manuals/tools than the OEMs), compared to all the home computers where of course they were always available and nobody felt a reason to rewrite them all.
Palm OS is getting livelier by the year. There's a number of younger folks getting into it, with some creating new apps, and it's been ported to new hardware.
My guess is that as time goes on, more development knowledge will be captured/OCRed into machine-searchable archives that will help the beginners. Using emulated/virtual development tool chains is also a lot less resource-intensive, and will help newcomers who don't know how to set these things up on their own.
the 80's were amazing :-)
I was there and they weren't.
Much better times today, imo.
I was a kid and there were Tron, Star Wars, video games, personal computing, hacking culture, etc. Those defined new things and point of views.
Sure we had thermonuclear war threats and a bit of AIDS. But that was basically all.
But as far as my craft is concerned (coding) there's no question about it, everything is so much easier now !