5 ms·

I think the author is way off base. Back in the day, everything related to computers was cool. It was a small priesthood for the nerdiest among us. Now that

I think the author is way off base. Back in the day, everything related to computers was cool. It was a small priesthood for the nerdiest among us. Now that Harvard MBAs are "going into tech" there is a whole lot of uncool computer-adjacent activity. But computers are cooler than ever. I can roll my own object detection algorithm to tell me if my dog is eating my shoes while I'm out. You can do so much cool stuff with them. Back in the day, Richard Feynman thought using computers to print tables of arctangents was cool. Look what we can do now! It is straight up wizardry (or sorcery).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yason 6y ago
But computers are cooler than ever. I can roll my own object detection algorithm to tell me if my dog is eating my shoes while I'm out. You can do so much cool stuff with them. On the other hand, if you remove enough limits from art or computation, nearly everything becomes a feasible possibility and that's boring! The best stuff always happens when you're constrained, and the end product from that just barely yet still magically works - maybe with a few hickups but well enough nevertheless.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  I don't know, there is nothing else I can think of that opens so many different capabilities with a little effort. If it was effortless then yeah it would be boring, but as is it still feels like actual wizardry when I make my computer do something cool, and these days the spellbook is a whole lot larger.
- II2II 6y ago
  > On the other hand, if you remove enough limits from art or computation, nearly everything becomes a feasible possibility and that's boring! I agree. What I am trying to figure out is why. About 25 years ago, I was enthusiastic about exploring 3D computer graphics. These days, I could hardly care less. Challenge isn't really an issue here because excellent 3-D graphics are more difficult to create simply because the bar has been raised so much higher. I suspect that doing something that feels innovative may be a big part of the problem. While this doesn't take away from the personal challenge of learning something new, it does diminish the sense of accomplishment. Or maybe something else is going on.
msla 6y ago
I think this article has a bad title, but I agree with its actual point, which is that back in the 1980s and early 1990s, desktop computers topped out at one level and workstations were a discontinuous jump above, unreachable as long as you were limited to commodity components and supply chains. Their hardware and software was Just Better (Than Home Systems Of The Same Era[1]) and it was certainly a lot cooler. I mean, NeXTcube vs Macintosh Quadra? Please! That said, this is a Kids These Days rant about how there is a smooth transition now, because the workstation as-was is a dead concept, replaced by desktop systems just a few price points more expensive than yours but which are still, fundamentally, the same kind of system. [1] But not better than modern systems: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WorkstationMythology https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WorkstationMyt...
- prox 6y ago
  I think that is why Raspberry Pi and the like are the new cool. They are different, and they can also be what you want it to be. They spark the imagination, and I think that’s the kind of magic of what the author describes. A system thats unique (and capable) is kind of the lure.
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    This. The new Pi 400 even kinda look like one of the early 80's machines.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  From a software perspective I would have preferred for workstations to remain their own thing. "home" computer software just doesn't take certain attributes seriously enough and with the way microsoft is treating the "pro" version of windows these days for example this lack of seriousness is bleeding over to the professional space.
- rjsw 6y ago
  A Macintosh Quadra can take a lot more RAM than a NeXTcube.
bayindirh 6y ago
> I think the author is way off base. No. They're just experiencing dense nostalgia. Also, they're pointing a much deeper issue with computing nowadays. I guess that I'm close to the author age-wise and, can relate to their feelings. I feel the same thing from time to time and had reflected upon that. They're missing the time where capacity and capability is visible from outside and, somewhat overt. You needed a powerful computer with SMP capabilities? You needed two actual CPUs, a special board, a lot of RAM, appropriate power supply, cooling and case. Now, a phone or a lowish-end SBC has more processing power than that beast. You wanted a lot of fast storage? Get the SCSI drives with big ribbon cables and terminators, set it up install the controller with its own dedicated XOR processor (for RAID) and listen disks spin up and sing with head seek and platter resonance sounds. Today a run of the mill USB 3.0 stick can transfer my first hard disk's capacity under a second. You wanted good network? You had to get a good NIC with its on-board offloading engine with lots of components and LEDs and shove it to your PC. Now? A measly battery powered Huawei modem sucks data at 100Mbit ethernet speed and shoves to a USB cable without you ever notice. A simple on board NIC can transfer 100MBps for days and whole system barely notices the streaming data. This visibility and explicitness of tech also brought simplicity with that. The most complicated thing was X86 protected mode and it wasn't that hard to fathom. Nothing was optimized beyond comprehension and with an in-order CPU, you can visualize everything from keypress to screen in your mind with some experience. Now a simple webpage is behind a webserver which is a load balancer to a K8S cluster which runs 10+ containers to keep everything scalable which runs deep inside a Linux system where you pass thru at least three networks (Internet->DC LAN->K8S->Docker) to access to the page you're looking for. Your cloud files are behind a REST API which terminates at a library which queries an object storage front end which retrieves your file from an object on a disk array god knows where (forget the details about array controllers, RAID, network, etc.) Even learning basic K8S is a multi-week effort now. This is what makes computing un-cool today. Migrating from a Raspberry Pi to a production system is not straightforward anymore. Nothing is simple anymore. Nothing is easily graspable anymore. Building abstractions to make things simpler has gone too far and the middle layers are just too many and too thick. It's too time consuming to try to learn everything just because of curiosity now. This is what makes computing uncool now. Note to self: This could be a blog post, heh.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

yason 6y ago

But computers are cooler than ever. I can roll my own object detection algorithm to tell me if my dog is eating my shoes while I'm out. You can do so much cool stuff with them. On the other hand, if you remove enough limits from art or computation, nearly everything becomes a feasible possibility and that's boring! The best stuff always happens when you're constrained, and the end product from that just barely yet still magically works - maybe with a few hickups but well enough nevertheless.

ravi-delia 6y ago
I don't know, there is nothing else I can think of that opens so many different capabilities with a little effort. If it was effortless then yeah it would be boring, but as is it still feels like actual wizardry when I make my computer do something cool, and these days the spellbook is a whole lot larger.
II2II 6y ago
> On the other hand, if you remove enough limits from art or computation, nearly everything becomes a feasible possibility and that's boring! I agree. What I am trying to figure out is why. About 25 years ago, I was enthusiastic about exploring 3D computer graphics. These days, I could hardly care less. Challenge isn't really an issue here because excellent 3-D graphics are more difficult to create simply because the bar has been raised so much higher. I suspect that doing something that feels innovative may be a big part of the problem. While this doesn't take away from the personal challenge of learning something new, it does diminish the sense of accomplishment. Or maybe something else is going on.

msla 6y ago

I think this article has a bad title, but I agree with its actual point, which is that back in the 1980s and early 1990s, desktop computers topped out at one level and workstations were a discontinuous jump above, unreachable as long as you were limited to commodity components and supply chains. Their hardware and software was Just Better (Than Home Systems Of The Same Era[1]) and it was certainly a lot cooler. I mean, NeXTcube vs Macintosh Quadra? Please! That said, this is a Kids These Days rant about how there is a smooth transition now, because the workstation as-was is a dead concept, replaced by desktop systems just a few price points more expensive than yours but which are still, fundamentally, the same kind of system. [1] But not better than modern systems: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WorkstationMythology https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WorkstationMyt...

prox 6y ago
I think that is why Raspberry Pi and the like are the new cool. They are different, and they can also be what you want it to be. They spark the imagination, and I think that’s the kind of magic of what the author describes. A system thats unique (and capable) is kind of the lure.
- fogihujy 6y ago
  This. The new Pi 400 even kinda look like one of the early 80's machines.
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
From a software perspective I would have preferred for workstations to remain their own thing. "home" computer software just doesn't take certain attributes seriously enough and with the way microsoft is treating the "pro" version of windows these days for example this lack of seriousness is bleeding over to the professional space.
rjsw 6y ago
A Macintosh Quadra can take a lot more RAM than a NeXTcube.

bayindirh 6y ago

> I think the author is way off base. No. They're just experiencing dense nostalgia. Also, they're pointing a much deeper issue with computing nowadays. I guess that I'm close to the author age-wise and, can relate to their feelings. I feel the same thing from time to time and had reflected upon that. They're missing the time where capacity and capability is visible from outside and, somewhat overt. You needed a powerful computer with SMP capabilities? You needed two actual CPUs, a special board, a lot of RAM, appropriate power supply, cooling and case. Now, a phone or a lowish-end SBC has more processing power than that beast. You wanted a lot of fast storage? Get the SCSI drives with big ribbon cables and terminators, set it up install the controller with its own dedicated XOR processor (for RAID) and listen disks spin up and sing with head seek and platter resonance sounds. Today a run of the mill USB 3.0 stick can transfer my first hard disk's capacity under a second. You wanted good network? You had to get a good NIC with its on-board offloading engine with lots of components and LEDs and shove it to your PC. Now? A measly battery powered Huawei modem sucks data at 100Mbit ethernet speed and shoves to a USB cable without you ever notice. A simple on board NIC can transfer 100MBps for days and whole system barely notices the streaming data. This visibility and explicitness of tech also brought simplicity with that. The most complicated thing was X86 protected mode and it wasn't that hard to fathom. Nothing was optimized beyond comprehension and with an in-order CPU, you can visualize everything from keypress to screen in your mind with some experience. Now a simple webpage is behind a webserver which is a load balancer to a K8S cluster which runs 10+ containers to keep everything scalable which runs deep inside a Linux system where you pass thru at least three networks (Internet->DC LAN->K8S->Docker) to access to the page you're looking for. Your cloud files are behind a REST API which terminates at a library which queries an object storage front end which retrieves your file from an object on a disk array god knows where (forget the details about array controllers, RAID, network, etc.) Even learning basic K8S is a multi-week effort now. This is what makes computing un-cool today. Migrating from a Raspberry Pi to a production system is not straightforward anymore. Nothing is simple anymore. Nothing is easily graspable anymore. Building abstractions to make things simpler has gone too far and the middle layers are just too many and too thick. It's too time consuming to try to learn everything just because of curiosity now. This is what makes computing uncool now. Note to self: This could be a blog post, heh.