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The PC and Internet Revolution in Rural America
- camillomiller 3y ago[flagged]
- Terr_ 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It's an author in the USA writing about their USA past experiences for USA audiences, using USA language. Complaining about the local terminology is a bit like if an English speaker were to criticize Spanish's gendered nouns as "sexist."
- voytec 3y ago> It's an author in the USA writing about their USA past experiences for USA audiences, using USA language. fuck you, readers from anywhere else in the world. ("USA language" is funny though)
- mmmmmmtoes 3y ago[dead]
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> Complaining about the local terminology is a bit like if an English speaker were to criticize Spanish's gendered nouns as "sexist." ...yes... no Anglophone would ever consider doing that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- camillomiller 3y agoI guess you mean "English"? I made a seriously innocent comment, but boy what a trigger for the defending forces of "American" exceptionalism. That was, is, and will be a tremendous self-reinforcing justification for everything the United States are entitled to do.
- DrDroop 3y agoThat is what is called a synekdoche, where a part refers to the whole or the whole refers to it's part. A good word to know as a quick reply when someone starts trying to debate the meaning of word.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoTo be totally clear, the synecdoche is between the word "America" [part] and the full phrase "the United States of America" [whole]. It would not be natural to refer to the country by the name of the continent.
- camillomiller 3y agoYou are trying to explain what a synecdoche is to someone who's trained in literature and the classics, reads Latin and ancient greek (with rusty proficiency) and writes for a living. Yet you spell it wrong and show that you don't have quite clear how it works. But sure, go ahead. Enlighten us.
- rhaway84773 3y agoAmerica pretty much means the USA. While it could refer to North America or South America alone, it usually means the USA. North America is the continent that includes Canada and Mexico. South America is the continent that includes Chile, Brazil, etc. (Im not exactly sure how Central America fits in). And the Americas refers to all of them put together. But just America itself will usually mean the USA.
- eru 3y ago> America pretty much means the USA. While it could refer to North America or South America alone, it usually means the USA. Especially in English. For people who speak English as a second or third (etc) language, that can sometimes be a bit hard to grasp. Eg in German, Amerika typically means the two continents (but confusingly can also mean the US of A).
- NoboruWataya 3y ago> Eg in German, Amerika typically means the two continents (but confusingly can also mean the US of A). This is the same in English: in normal usage it usually means the USA, but it can also mean the continents as in "Columbus discovered America". Maybe the difference is more that English speakers are more likely to rely on context to infer the meaning of ambiguous terms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
- prmoustache 3y agoIt is just plain cultural imperialism from the USA.
- rhaway84773 3y agoI mean, this is ridiculous. The people chanting “Death to America” didn’t mean Chile. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t major consumers of American culture. And Americans don’t commonly chant “America” any moment they get. They famously, and obnoxiously, chant U.S.A. every time they can. The U.S. has been the most prominent nation in the region for generations, and most importantly, it’s the only country in the entire region that has the word America in it’s name. People have reasons to talk about countries far more than continents, and reasons to talk about the USA more than most other countries. The fact that America is commonly accepted as shorthand for the United States of America when there is no other country in the world with the word America is hardly cultural imperialism. It’s an insult to people and nations that have actually suffered from imperialism to brand this as “cultural imperialism”.
- foooorsyth 3y agoNo. You don’t control my use of language. “America” is a perfectly fine synechdoche for United States of America. As the dominant economic and military power of the past century, the use of “America” to refer to USA is an organic vernacular that cropped up all around the world. It didn’t just come from Americans. Go cope somewhere else. I’ll keep saying America. Tired of cry-bully whiners trying to tell everyone else how to speak.
- prmoustache 3y agoThis is just USSR level imperialism.
- foooorsyth 3y agoYOU are the one trying to impose speech on ME. Who’s the imperialist? Americans refer to their country as America. Non-Americans refer to the US as America. This all happened organically. You cry about it on the behalf of less-relevant countries sharing the same continent and try to change how people talk. Cope somewhere else.
- defrost 3y ago> Non-Americans refer to the US as America. BBC has United States related stories https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cx1m7zg01xyt https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cx1m7zg01xyt Enough of the seppo exceptialism, please. America is a geographic area with a North, South, and Central. Central North Americans weirdly think otherwise.
- foooorsyth 3y agoGood to know that a British news publication determines the vernacular for everyone around the world. I’ll be sure to refer to bbc.com’s regional delineations before insensitively referring to any part of the world in a manner that may hurt your feelings. Thanks for the tip! Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just speak freely with reasonable, organic language that isn’t dictated by cry bullies and false authorities. You don’t get to tell me how to speak. Sorry if that pains you.
- ben_w 3y agoTo avoid confusion, I suggest we rename the country after the etymology origin: America -> Amerigo (Vespucci) -> Enrico -> Haimirich -> Heim + rihhi -> 𐌷𐌰𐌹𐌼𐍃 𐍂𐌴𐌹𐌺𐌴𐌹𐍃 Gothic should appeal to all those weirdos who insist it's an anglo-Saxon culture. :P (And then rename the continent the same way, because people want to keep having the same argument…)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoHuh. I guess when any other country on either continent uses the word America in their name, it might become ambiguous. Until then, America in the context of a country is perfectly clear?
- mmmmmmtoes 3y ago[dead]
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoThere's this country, and its full, formal name is "The United States of America". But that's kind of long for use all the time, so most people, in most of the world, shorten it to "America". You seem to want us to use "United States" instead, because you seem to think that 1) it's your business to tell everyone else what they should shorten the name to, and 2) calling it "America" is unfair to the rest of the Americas. But surely calling it "United States" is unfair to the United States of Mexico? And if you can't call it that either, all that's left is "of", and that would be unfair to the Dominion of Canada. So we're going to keep calling it "America", because that's what we've always called it, and because your alternative doesn't work either. Can we get off your hobby horse now, and go back to talking about the article?
- camillomiller 3y agoMmm your point is moot. USA is way shorter than any of your options.
- 3littlefish 3y agoI found this fascinating. Although a very different experience, it brought back memories of first getting online as a student in the UK in the 90s and what a miracle that seemed and how genuinely world changing it was.
- einr 3y agoThis is a nitpick, but early PC BIOS with C/H/S addressing could address up to 504 MB (1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors) just fine. There was nothing stopping you from using a 32 MB drive, like the article implies. What you did often run in to is that early BIOSes would only support fixed disk types, and not arbitrary C/H/S values. In some cases this would prevent you from using the full capacity of your hard drive when upgrading. 32 MB was a common early size, though, and would generally be covered by the standard disk types.
- h2odragon 3y ago32MB was a DOS limitation, i think. FAT12/FAT16 filesystem perhaps? DOS 3.0 days iirc.
- jaclaz 3y agoDos before 3.0 used FAT12, limited to 16 MB, DOS 3.0 introduced FAT16 (though in a reduced 14 bit version) that extended size to 32 MB, DOS 4.0 had "real" 16 bit FAT16: https://hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-drives-capacity-limits/ https://hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-drives-capacity-limits... These were limits to the partition/volume size, however.
- galangalalgol 3y agoThis account is very similar to my own including the start date, except we had a c64 (with disk drive). Even once we had a modem, virtually every BBS was long distance. It wasn't until I was well into highschool that the Internet was accessible out there. CD based encyclopedias were mostly sparse subsets of paper ones with some movies included. Knowledge was still hard to find and dated. Biyearly trips to the nearest city let me get some computer books, and since I couldn't connect out, I dove in and learned x86 assembler and the low level details of PC architecture. In retrospect, it was a very unique moment to be involved in computing and it produces a rather unique viewpoint.
- phone8675309 3y agoI've noticed this trend among my fellow 80s kids - connecting out was either expensive or impossible for many so they dove deeper into the details of how their computer worked. I have found that being able to stay on task and dig into these things has become a lot more difficult as I get older - part of that is probably age but part of it is that I have a World of Distraction available just a click away, and the pull of cheap dopamine is strong.
- galangalalgol 3y agoPart of it is also the vastly greater complexity of axi buses and svi2 buses and trusted compute modules that load stuff for the processor... Yeah I can't even follow the boot procedure of a modern computer. The arm cores in a usb3 controller have more juice than the computers I bhad back then.
- ghaff 3y agoDuring some period intrastate long distance (i.e. outside of your immediate local calling area) could actually be more expensive than a call to another state/area code. As I recall, at one point, I actually got a phone plan that let me call 40 or 50 miles into a subscription BBS into a nearby city so my telephone costs weren't exorbitant. (Still used various software that let me go in and out quickly and do most of my reading and writing offline.)
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoWoah. This site displays text across the width of my monitor. I feel so alive and dirty now and want to violate other internet protocol.
- cdkmoose 3y agoThis story really hits home. I started a little earlier but rural Maine was just as isolated. My first computer at home was a TRS-80 Model 1 we got in 1979. It had a cassette deck for storing programs. I spent many hours hand entering game and utility source code from Byte magazine. I got my first IBM compatible while in college around 1985, 640 K and DUAL floppies. It was from a startup PC maker named PCs Limited, started by a college drop out named Michael Dell. Two floppy disks provided infinite opportunities. A 300 baud modem connected me to the campus mainframe. Years later for work I remember having a 28.8K (then 56K) modem to connect to work on nights and weekends to do support work and access the companies T-1 line. Strangely enough, by the time cable was run to my parents home in that rural Maine town it was more cost effective to run fiber than copper, so my parents got fiber to the house.