The magic of having the TV blink on every press of the membrane keyboard while copying programs out of the manual, which had a funny smell[0]. Once my brother

The magic of having the TV blink on every press of the membrane keyboard while copying programs out of the manual, which had a funny smell[0]. Once my brother and I got Commodore 64's, we could see the golden age receding -- the Super Expander[1] clearly did not want us to suffer enough for our own good, and GEOS[2] embraced the blasphemy of XEROX. By the time I bought an Amiga instead of a car, my retired neighbor was already looking up from his Tandy[3] to will me off his damned lawn. Seriously though, there have been a lot of Golden Ages already and I hope there will be a lot more. My nostalgia for the time I started out is strong, but when I look at it objectively I see two things I think genuinely were better in the 80's, from a cultural if not an economic perspective: 1) There were many competing hardware and software ecosystems, even paradigms, and it was absolutely not obvious what we'd all be using five or ten years down the road. We live with an impoverished imagination of personal computing now. 2) People working in tech out of pure nerdy love outnumbered the people in it for the money by about 20:1. Now that's reversed, or worse. [0]: https://www.timexsinclair.com/computers/sinclair-zx80/ https://www.timexsinclair.com/computers/sinclair-zx80/ [1]: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Super_Expander_64 https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Super_Expander_64 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80