5 ms·

The first computer shop that I went to as a kid (back when computer shops were a thing) had a very distinct smell that still evokes very strong memories for me

The first computer shop that I went to as a kid (back when computer shops were a thing) had a very distinct smell that still evokes very strong memories for me now. I guess it probably wasn’t the computers themselves, but maybe that foamed rubber material used for mousepads and such, plus maybe some static charge in the air from CRTs or something? Any time I catch that smell, I’m immediately back playing Loom and Monkey Island and oogling at Pentiums and 1 GB hard drives.

YZF 3y ago
Dust burning in those monitors perhaps?
hattmall 3y ago
Are things just not as fascinating now? Is there anything similarly cutting edge today. I know that part of it I was much younger but I also remember most of the people around were way older and seemed to share in the wonder and amazement at those GB+ hard drives and the thought of 32mb of ram. I guess there's just not anything new that's advancing so rapidly.?.? Like my computer is 13 years old and is still overpowered for 99% of tasks. And they are still selling brand new computers with far lower specs. Imagine in 1997 being satisfied as a developer with a computer from 1984! I also have other interests and it feels like they have plateaued similarly. I guess I'm still getting some dopamine from solar and battery tech, price drops at least, and some neatness around microcontrollers and IOT but like even food has stopped seeming innovate. It used to be worthy of a day trip to drive into the city to eat at new exotic offerings and now every small town has mostly the same stuff and there's nothing really new in the city either.
- grogenaut 3y ago
  You missed out on 3d printers in the last 2 decades apparently. Those have gone leaps and bounds from very rickety prototypes like the og MakerBot to cheap workhorses. Stepper motors used to cost like $75 ea and are now like 4 for $15. Smart phones as well. Many of these things you don't notice till they're everywhere. If I spent more time I could list many other things I think but I don't know your filter
  - serialNumber 3y ago
    Please list more things if you have some time
    - dr_dshiv 3y ago
      Electric bikes and scooters
  - echelon 3y ago
    The last two decades seemed to have progressed glacially slow. We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops. 3D printing has come a fair way, but we're still not printing cars at home. (I totally would download a car.) Now all of a sudden we have AI/ML, self-driving cars, high fidelity consumer mocap, AR/VR. The types of things coming out now seem way more sci-fi, cutting edge, and optimistic. A return to the imagination and dreams of the 1950's - 1990's. 2000 - 2020 was a speed bump.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - xcv123 3y ago
      From 2000 to 2010 we progressed from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.
      - nuancebydefault 3y ago
        The point is more - today's smartphones are the first iphone with a better camera and faster data connection. That said in other areas there's much more improvement, for example EVs, solar panels, intelligent search engines. Remember the days when we used scripts that would parallelize searches over lycos, yahoo, webcrawler, altavista, alltheweb, ...
        3y ago
- Schiendelman 3y ago
  What you're experiencing is largely that now everything is nearly instantly discoverable. In the 1980s and 90s, you would find out about new technology or product at a computer store. You might read an article in a computer magazine about a technology, but for a product, you're as likely to learn about it from a knowledgeable clerk. And clerks had to be knowledgeable because they were that initial discovery mechanism. Now, you find out about a new technology or product instantly, and you learn about them constantly. It is rare that a company develops something new enough that it's significantly differentiated from something you already know about (or even have) that it's exciting. Even Apple had a lot of leaks before Vision Pro (which is potentially the most exciting new technology product, at least for me, in years). They had to balance when to announce it with the leaks - to maximize the impact while ensuring you didn't have to wait too long to get one.
  - sublinear 3y ago
    I think you're missing the point. Even the Vision Pro is just incrementally better than Hololens almost a decade later.
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      > the Vision Pro is just incrementally better than Hololens Hololens had 1268x720 per eye[1] or 1.8MP across both eyes. Vision Pro is 23MP across both eyes. Are you seriously saying that's "incrementally better"? It's a literal order of magnitude more pixels! [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/419869/we-found-7-critical-hololens-details-that-microsoft-hid-inside-its-developer-docs.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/419869/we-found-7-critical-h...
      - lagrange77 3y ago
        It's still 'vertically scaling' the number of pixels of hololens like devices. That might have needed innovations in manufacturing, but the product itself is not much of an innovation in my book.
      - II2II 3y ago
- shubb 3y ago
  The smell of a newly opened rewriteable CD
  - netule 3y ago
    Wow, I can still evoke the memory and scent of that first spindle of blank CDs I bought for my 1x CD writer. It's so distinct and unforgettable.
- citizenpaul 3y ago
  the short answer is pretty much all tech we use was invented in the 1970's and is just being iterated on at this point. There really is not much new coming out and all the really cool stuff has turned out to be too difficult to be reliable or require too much power to ever get beyond toy status.
- II2II 3y ago
  It was more than the rate of progress, though the rate of progress certainly helped. For a lot of people the computers of the 70's, 80's, and 90's captured their imagination because of how it could change the world. The same could be said of prior technological revolutions. Even though we see a lot of technological progress these days, we are mostly out of the revolution phase. The computer is a part of our lives, much like electricity, the automobile, and the airplane. Those who love gadgets will be excited about each new step, yet it is nowhere near as exciting to everyone else. That is not to say that we are out of the revolution phase. People were genuinely excited about developments in mobile phones until a few years ago. This current hubbub over AI may stimulate people imaginations if it doesn't end up stalling again. I chuckled at your comment about a 1997 developer being satisfied with 1984 technology. It seems like some 2023 developers are excited about 1984 technology. In many cases, it is because the tooling for things like build your own computers at the component level has become more accessible (rather than being an exercise in pure nostalgia).
Forge36 3y ago
I don't know what you smelled. But this conjured up the image of an old blue mousepad I used as a kid (and the smell!). Well done.

YZF 3y ago

Dust burning in those monitors perhaps?

hattmall 3y ago

Are things just not as fascinating now? Is there anything similarly cutting edge today. I know that part of it I was much younger but I also remember most of the people around were way older and seemed to share in the wonder and amazement at those GB+ hard drives and the thought of 32mb of ram. I guess there's just not anything new that's advancing so rapidly.?.? Like my computer is 13 years old and is still overpowered for 99% of tasks. And they are still selling brand new computers with far lower specs. Imagine in 1997 being satisfied as a developer with a computer from 1984! I also have other interests and it feels like they have plateaued similarly. I guess I'm still getting some dopamine from solar and battery tech, price drops at least, and some neatness around microcontrollers and IOT but like even food has stopped seeming innovate. It used to be worthy of a day trip to drive into the city to eat at new exotic offerings and now every small town has mostly the same stuff and there's nothing really new in the city either.

grogenaut 3y ago
You missed out on 3d printers in the last 2 decades apparently. Those have gone leaps and bounds from very rickety prototypes like the og MakerBot to cheap workhorses. Stepper motors used to cost like $75 ea and are now like 4 for $15. Smart phones as well. Many of these things you don't notice till they're everywhere. If I spent more time I could list many other things I think but I don't know your filter
- serialNumber 3y ago
  Please list more things if you have some time
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    Electric bikes and scooters
- echelon 3y ago
  The last two decades seemed to have progressed glacially slow. We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops. 3D printing has come a fair way, but we're still not printing cars at home. (I totally would download a car.) Now all of a sudden we have AI/ML, self-driving cars, high fidelity consumer mocap, AR/VR. The types of things coming out now seem way more sci-fi, cutting edge, and optimistic. A return to the imagination and dreams of the 1950's - 1990's. 2000 - 2020 was a speed bump.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - xcv123 3y ago
    From 2000 to 2010 we progressed from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.
    - nuancebydefault 3y ago
      The point is more - today's smartphones are the first iphone with a better camera and faster data connection. That said in other areas there's much more improvement, for example EVs, solar panels, intelligent search engines. Remember the days when we used scripts that would parallelize searches over lycos, yahoo, webcrawler, altavista, alltheweb, ...
      - 3y ago
Schiendelman 3y ago
What you're experiencing is largely that now everything is nearly instantly discoverable. In the 1980s and 90s, you would find out about new technology or product at a computer store. You might read an article in a computer magazine about a technology, but for a product, you're as likely to learn about it from a knowledgeable clerk. And clerks had to be knowledgeable because they were that initial discovery mechanism. Now, you find out about a new technology or product instantly, and you learn about them constantly. It is rare that a company develops something new enough that it's significantly differentiated from something you already know about (or even have) that it's exciting. Even Apple had a lot of leaks before Vision Pro (which is potentially the most exciting new technology product, at least for me, in years). They had to balance when to announce it with the leaks - to maximize the impact while ensuring you didn't have to wait too long to get one.
- sublinear 3y ago
  I think you're missing the point. Even the Vision Pro is just incrementally better than Hololens almost a decade later.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > the Vision Pro is just incrementally better than Hololens Hololens had 1268x720 per eye[1] or 1.8MP across both eyes. Vision Pro is 23MP across both eyes. Are you seriously saying that's "incrementally better"? It's a literal order of magnitude more pixels! [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/419869/we-found-7-critical-hololens-details-that-microsoft-hid-inside-its-developer-docs.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/419869/we-found-7-critical-h...
    - lagrange77 3y ago
      It's still 'vertically scaling' the number of pixels of hololens like devices. That might have needed innovations in manufacturing, but the product itself is not much of an innovation in my book.
    - II2II 3y ago
shubb 3y ago
The smell of a newly opened rewriteable CD
- netule 3y ago
  Wow, I can still evoke the memory and scent of that first spindle of blank CDs I bought for my 1x CD writer. It's so distinct and unforgettable.
citizenpaul 3y ago
the short answer is pretty much all tech we use was invented in the 1970's and is just being iterated on at this point. There really is not much new coming out and all the really cool stuff has turned out to be too difficult to be reliable or require too much power to ever get beyond toy status.
II2II 3y ago
It was more than the rate of progress, though the rate of progress certainly helped. For a lot of people the computers of the 70's, 80's, and 90's captured their imagination because of how it could change the world. The same could be said of prior technological revolutions. Even though we see a lot of technological progress these days, we are mostly out of the revolution phase. The computer is a part of our lives, much like electricity, the automobile, and the airplane. Those who love gadgets will be excited about each new step, yet it is nowhere near as exciting to everyone else. That is not to say that we are out of the revolution phase. People were genuinely excited about developments in mobile phones until a few years ago. This current hubbub over AI may stimulate people imaginations if it doesn't end up stalling again. I chuckled at your comment about a 1997 developer being satisfied with 1984 technology. It seems like some 2023 developers are excited about 1984 technology. In many cases, it is because the tooling for things like build your own computers at the component level has become more accessible (rather than being an exercise in pure nostalgia).

Forge36 3y ago

I don't know what you smelled. But this conjured up the image of an old blue mousepad I used as a kid (and the smell!). Well done.