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I was born in the 70s and when I was a young computer enthusiast my reading experience is similar: there was a glory era of hacking and experimentation and lisp

I was born in the 70s and when I was a young computer enthusiast my reading experience is similar: there was a glory era of hacking and experimentation and lisp machines and fun but now it was over and we had to live in this era of professionalism and msdos and you couldn't phreak a phone anymore. Then I got to college and discovered the internet just as the web was getting started and I started to realize that even though that old era was gone forever, here's a thing that's new and exciting and at least as world-changing. I still see that 'wow those old timey hackers were really something, and we'll never have the like again' mindset floating around the internet, even here on HN. (For example, people talking about how great lisp machines were or how great smalltalk environments were and how it's such a tragedy that we'll never see their like again).

generic_user 10y ago
There is a similar dynamic with first wave Linux people who love the decentralized community oriented 1990's and 2000's that have been reshaped by the 2010's which have been highly centralizing and corporate driven with systemd, containerization etc. Are the 2010's going to be looked back at in 30 yeas as a horrible decade that destroyed the ambitions of thousands of 12 year old female SysVinit scripting wizkids? Its possible but it seems highly pedantic and silly to think so. Projecting our current arguments onto history usually ends up as colorful revisionism that is historically inaccurate and politicized. I think people are quite rightly skeptical of such attempts. The tactic is used endlessly in politics, which is certainly not the bastion of accurate factual argument and reasoned discourse.
- deleted 10y ago
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