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I agree that it's partly an age thing, but I also agree that the times have been more exciting in the past technology-wise. I grew up as a eighties tech geek k

by rob74 5y ago

I agree that it's partly an age thing, but I also agree that the times have been more exciting in the past technology-wise. I grew up as a eighties tech geek kid. I learned BASIC on a SHARP programmable calculator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403), then moved on to an Atari 800, then to an Amiga, and finally to a PC. Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. Well, that didn't quite turn out the way 20 year old me imagined unfortunately. Of course, technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago". SpaceX rockets look practically indistinguishable from rockets that flew 50-70 years ago. Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). Same with self-driving cars and other potentially exciting stuff.

zozbot234 5y ago
> Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factor. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on. > Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like. > Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). The Space Shuttle was not a dead end, it had all sorts of cool capabilities that we're only now getting back with the SpaceX Starship. And rockets that land again are a big deal because they radically change the equation of how much it costs to launch things into space.
- frostwarrior 5y ago
  > As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factors. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on. He talks about functionality. Not power. Yes, computers are more powerful now. But the point is that old computers were way more flexible and "powerful" in an usability sense. New computers are full of arbitrary (and natural (1)) barriers to stop you from having full control of your pocket CPU. (1) The natural additional barrier is also complexity. Early computers were simple. Some hobbyist could write a system from scratch just by having some knowledge about computers and electronics. Now you have a lot more factors, an OS, a plethora of drivers and a browser that's closer to a VM than a HTML parser. > There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like. You are right. But that kind of connection is disappointing to our 20 year old geek self. We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news. Arguably, we got both. Even basic computer literacy is a huge value added right now. Journalists are telling coal miners to "learn to code" if they want a job, and being told to "learn to code" in return. Tim Apple is expressly saying that every kid should learn to code. This is astounding from a 1980s and 1990s perspective.
- mercutio2 5y ago
  All sorts of cool things that we’re now getting back to with Starship 40 years later… sounds like the very definition of a dead end to me! No one took Shuttle and iterated on it. It had a bunch of impractical ideas combined for primarily political reasons that resulted in actual shuttle flights being incredibly dangerous. It delivered lots of pork, but at the cost of actual progress.
nicoburns 5y ago
> technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago" In terms of tech that would excite a geeky kid, I think it's more like "you can now buy a $1 microcontroller that's as powerful as desktop PC from 30 years ago". Which is pretty exciting as it means you can throw computing power at all sorts of real world automated which wasn't feasible for a hobbyist before. TL;DR The modern equivalent of a programmable calculator is an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi not a smartphone.
- eternauta3k 5y ago
  What microcontroller are you thinking of?
  - foldr 5y ago
    Quite a few of the following options would give a 386SX from 1992 a run for its money in terms of raw computing power: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcontrollers/685?s=N4IgjCBcoKwAwDYqgMZQGYEMA2BnApgDQgD2UA2iAMxgAsAHPVSMTQ-TCyLQOxUCcPTsQQcATAjFdaDMTAis69fnBABdYgAcALlBABlbQCcAlgDsA5iAC%2BxMP2XIQaSFjxFSFEKo0gdew1NLG2IAWiloZyhjAFcPMkhKYRB%2BdWtbEAjKAFsTFCMSFBIzYxJsbHwjdREnEwATPVCwOAU-XUgQLm0AT018PUxcNHSgA https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcon... To compete with a high end 486 desktop from 1992 you might have to pay a bit more than $1, particularly if you want floating point.
    - Narishma 5y ago
      Not to mention the lack of memory on microcontrollers.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    ESP8266/32 is slightly over a $1 but still within the spirit of “more like $1 micro”. Confining more strictly to $1.00, STM32F030F4P6 (48MHz 32-bit M0) is in spitting distance to a 386 or 20MHz 68030 for some workloads. (50 MHz 486-DX2 was introduced in ‘92, but the typical desktop PC of 1992 was much lower spec.)
koonsolo 5y ago
Are you crazy? I'm from '79, so probably a bit younger than you. We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. Even with a small camera or some sensors if you want. Or create some small robots with all the motors and sensors that you want, custom 3d printed. My son is now 13 and doing STEM. I only wish I had access to all the things that they can now do for cheap, especially all the robotics and drone stuff. Plus, the amount of info on the internet is amazing and quickly accessible anywhere. I agree that the old days were a lot of fun, but if I had to choose, I would want to be 13 nowadays instead of the 80s or 90s.
- dvh1990 5y ago
  Well yes, but flying drones are not exciting when everybody can build/buy one.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    What's interesting is not having a drone, but what you do with them. It's like saying photography is not exciting when everyone has a camera.
    - tarboreus 5y ago
      It kind of isn't. though.
      - throwaway675309 5y ago
        You shouldn't derive whether or not something is exciting to yourself by its exclusivity. I can't even begin to state how wrong that feels.
      - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
        That's so subjective. My photography is interesting to me, and draws admiration and interest from almost everyone I share it with, even though they themselves have phones with cameras.
irrational 5y ago
I don’t know about your experience, but I grew up during the same time period. Tech was decidedly uncool, at least among my classmates. I don’t think tech became cool until the early 2000s when smartphones took off (specifically the combination of smarthphones and social media/communication). Now these things are so common place that I think they have ceased to be cool. It’s like considering a rotary or push button phone to be cool in the 1980s.
- yakytaky 5y ago
  I agree with this. I’m a somewhere between generation X and millennial, and for some reason tech was uncool in the eyes of my peers. Suddenly many of them are talking about decentralized this, UX that, and the whole space is slowly losing it’s “coolness” to me. I’ll admit I enjoyed the exclusivity that my interests evolved into, but I definitely wish I had more people around me to share my interest in technology when I was younger. In a way I think I grew into this expectation of exclusivity, as that was the only way my adolescent self could tell myself it was a cool hobby. Age might play a factor in this equation, as others are saying. I say this because I have found enjoyment in simplicity more than complexity these days, and I’m told that’s something that happens with age. Writing a website that runs purely on html+ css, text based communication (as in not slack or discord), and things that I can work on for a few days and complete. I’ve taken a recent interest in sailing. My former self wanted to take on massive undertakings of complexity that required months or years of planning and doing to accomplish. To go on a bit of a tangent, I remember having an idea years ago to find a way to build a computer into a boat which would take real-time measurements of the water and weather conditions. These days I’m interested in reading my surroundings to understand the environment.
janj 5y ago
I might be wrong but it sounds like what excited you was seeing the progress of the tools, not necessarily what YOU can do with the tools. If that's the case then yeah, it's probably getting harder to put your hands on tools that are orders of magnitude greater than what you just had. I'm learning guitar, all the tools I can get are all very exciting because I haven't seen them before, and I could acquire them a lot faster than I can improve my abilities. But if I don't put in the time to advance myself along with the tools they will quickly become "boring", but only because I'm not able to use them effectively.

by rob74 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago

> Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factor. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on. > Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like. > Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). The Space Shuttle was not a dead end, it had all sorts of cool capabilities that we're only now getting back with the SpaceX Starship. And rockets that land again are a big deal because they radically change the equation of how much it costs to launch things into space.

frostwarrior 5y ago
> As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factors. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on. He talks about functionality. Not power. Yes, computers are more powerful now. But the point is that old computers were way more flexible and "powerful" in an usability sense. New computers are full of arbitrary (and natural (1)) barriers to stop you from having full control of your pocket CPU. (1) The natural additional barrier is also complexity. Early computers were simple. Some hobbyist could write a system from scratch just by having some knowledge about computers and electronics. Now you have a lot more factors, an OS, a plethora of drivers and a browser that's closer to a VM than a HTML parser. > There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like. You are right. But that kind of connection is disappointing to our 20 year old geek self. We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news. Arguably, we got both. Even basic computer literacy is a huge value added right now. Journalists are telling coal miners to "learn to code" if they want a job, and being told to "learn to code" in return. Tim Apple is expressly saying that every kid should learn to code. This is astounding from a 1980s and 1990s perspective.
mercutio2 5y ago
All sorts of cool things that we’re now getting back to with Starship 40 years later… sounds like the very definition of a dead end to me! No one took Shuttle and iterated on it. It had a bunch of impractical ideas combined for primarily political reasons that resulted in actual shuttle flights being incredibly dangerous. It delivered lots of pork, but at the cost of actual progress.

nicoburns 5y ago

> technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago" In terms of tech that would excite a geeky kid, I think it's more like "you can now buy a $1 microcontroller that's as powerful as desktop PC from 30 years ago". Which is pretty exciting as it means you can throw computing power at all sorts of real world automated which wasn't feasible for a hobbyist before. TL;DR The modern equivalent of a programmable calculator is an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi not a smartphone.

eternauta3k 5y ago
What microcontroller are you thinking of?
- foldr 5y ago
  Quite a few of the following options would give a 386SX from 1992 a run for its money in terms of raw computing power: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcontrollers/685?s=N4IgjCBcoKwAwDYqgMZQGYEMA2BnApgDQgD2UA2iAMxgAsAHPVSMTQ-TCyLQOxUCcPTsQQcATAjFdaDMTAis69fnBABdYgAcALlBABlbQCcAlgDsA5iAC%2BxMP2XIQaSFjxFSFEKo0gdew1NLG2IAWiloZyhjAFcPMkhKYRB%2BdWtbEAjKAFsTFCMSFBIzYxJsbHwjdREnEwATPVCwOAU-XUgQLm0AT018PUxcNHSgA https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcon... To compete with a high end 486 desktop from 1992 you might have to pay a bit more than $1, particularly if you want floating point.
  - Narishma 5y ago
    Not to mention the lack of memory on microcontrollers.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  ESP8266/32 is slightly over a $1 but still within the spirit of “more like $1 micro”. Confining more strictly to $1.00, STM32F030F4P6 (48MHz 32-bit M0) is in spitting distance to a 386 or 20MHz 68030 for some workloads. (50 MHz 486-DX2 was introduced in ‘92, but the typical desktop PC of 1992 was much lower spec.)

koonsolo 5y ago

Are you crazy? I'm from '79, so probably a bit younger than you. We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. Even with a small camera or some sensors if you want. Or create some small robots with all the motors and sensors that you want, custom 3d printed. My son is now 13 and doing STEM. I only wish I had access to all the things that they can now do for cheap, especially all the robotics and drone stuff. Plus, the amount of info on the internet is amazing and quickly accessible anywhere. I agree that the old days were a lot of fun, but if I had to choose, I would want to be 13 nowadays instead of the 80s or 90s.

dvh1990 5y ago
Well yes, but flying drones are not exciting when everybody can build/buy one.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  What's interesting is not having a drone, but what you do with them. It's like saying photography is not exciting when everyone has a camera.
  - tarboreus 5y ago
    It kind of isn't. though.
    - throwaway675309 5y ago
      You shouldn't derive whether or not something is exciting to yourself by its exclusivity. I can't even begin to state how wrong that feels.
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      That's so subjective. My photography is interesting to me, and draws admiration and interest from almost everyone I share it with, even though they themselves have phones with cameras.

irrational 5y ago

I don’t know about your experience, but I grew up during the same time period. Tech was decidedly uncool, at least among my classmates. I don’t think tech became cool until the early 2000s when smartphones took off (specifically the combination of smarthphones and social media/communication). Now these things are so common place that I think they have ceased to be cool. It’s like considering a rotary or push button phone to be cool in the 1980s.

yakytaky 5y ago
I agree with this. I’m a somewhere between generation X and millennial, and for some reason tech was uncool in the eyes of my peers. Suddenly many of them are talking about decentralized this, UX that, and the whole space is slowly losing it’s “coolness” to me. I’ll admit I enjoyed the exclusivity that my interests evolved into, but I definitely wish I had more people around me to share my interest in technology when I was younger. In a way I think I grew into this expectation of exclusivity, as that was the only way my adolescent self could tell myself it was a cool hobby. Age might play a factor in this equation, as others are saying. I say this because I have found enjoyment in simplicity more than complexity these days, and I’m told that’s something that happens with age. Writing a website that runs purely on html+ css, text based communication (as in not slack or discord), and things that I can work on for a few days and complete. I’ve taken a recent interest in sailing. My former self wanted to take on massive undertakings of complexity that required months or years of planning and doing to accomplish. To go on a bit of a tangent, I remember having an idea years ago to find a way to build a computer into a boat which would take real-time measurements of the water and weather conditions. These days I’m interested in reading my surroundings to understand the environment.

janj 5y ago

I might be wrong but it sounds like what excited you was seeing the progress of the tools, not necessarily what YOU can do with the tools. If that's the case then yeah, it's probably getting harder to put your hands on tools that are orders of magnitude greater than what you just had. I'm learning guitar, all the tools I can get are all very exciting because I haven't seen them before, and I could acquire them a lot faster than I can improve my abilities. But if I don't put in the time to advance myself along with the tools they will quickly become "boring", but only because I'm not able to use them effectively.