7 ms·

Our father's shrines are our children's ashtrays. I'm mentoring a couple guys on my team, both born solidly after the year 2000 by their own anecdotes, buildin

Our father's shrines are our children's ashtrays. I'm mentoring a couple guys on my team, both born solidly after the year 2000 by their own anecdotes, building them up as Linux infrastructure engineers. I covet the video cameras we use on our remote meetings, because I can tell when to stop talking about the history by their body language drooping. I've had a few a-hah moments, using connections to the same history ESR scribbled above, but largely I am finding that regaling the younger people with details from before they were born is not interesting because they were not here for it and have no connection to it.

adamrezich 3y ago
> but largely I am finding that regaling the younger people with details from before they were born is not interesting because they were not here for it and have no connection to it. I don't understand why this attitude is so pervasive nowadays. in my opinion, curiosity about one's craft's history is a crucial part of the hacker spirit. I can't imagine, for example, never having used a landline, yet not finding phreaking to be incredibly interesting to learn more about, even though it's about as far from practical knowledge today as it could be. did we mess up somewhere and fail to convey this aspect of the hacker spirit to the youth? or are things just changing too rapidly?
- mistrial9 3y ago
  stackoverflow literally removed the mentorship stage for a generation
- sockaddr 3y ago
  I think things are more competitive and fast-paced nowadays than when we entered this space and so history and all of the details that come along with it aren't necessarily their first priority. I don't blame them. For example, When I was first getting into computers I felt like I had all the time in the world to perfect writing batch files and I could pour over a single magazine at a leisurely pace for weeks until the next one came out. Nowadays every time you use your face to unlock your magic pane of glass there's a language, a new framework, a new more impressive AI you can build your business on or some creepy guy trying to scan everyone's eyeballs, it's just different.
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    I think there's also an aspect of computer programming having become more of a fashion than a craft, in many cases. game development used to be very difficult and people who worked in that field pushed the limits of what hardware and software could do. nowadays, free-to-download general-purpose engines make getting into "game development" extremely easy. web development became its own whole thing by means of frameworks and so forth, where now to get into it, you're more learning how specific frameworks and such work, rather than underlying engineering principles. how many people who program computers professionally for big tech companies are "hackers", these days, compared to one decade ago? two? three? surely the ratio has only decreased over time, as more and more people get into the field for purely pragmatic reasons (income, clout, etc.) than taking part in/engaging with "the hacker spirit". for better or worse, gates have not been kept, and now things are completely different than they once were.
    - dajt 3y ago
      30+ years ago I was programming for companies doing business software - ERP etc, and there were very few 'hackers' in the ranks. These guys and gals must have enjoyed programming at some point but I guess the software was so boring it just leached the joy out of it. Certainly by the mid-late 80s there were far more day job programmers around than hackers. In one company I managed to find a few fellow hackers, but the next one I worked at - nothing. It was awful. Luckily after that I managed to get more interesting work for a while, but then I spent too long in the wrong part of Oracle and again, I just couldn't find fun in the coding we were doing and no-one else could either. I think true hackers or enthusiasts have always been in the minority, at least since the late 70s I'd guess.
- quacked 3y ago
  > did we mess up somewhere and fail to convey this aspect of the hacker spirit to the youth? or are things just changing too rapidly? I think that young people today don't perceive themselves as having any free time, and so they treat new things as they're taught in school: optimize the solution, get your grade/get paid, and go back to the precious little free time you have available to enjoy your life. The disappearing free time is partially true, as the reach of the school environment grows and homework/extracurricular burdens increase. It's also partially imagined, because most young people burn 4-9 hours per day on their phones. It's not their fault, since phones are designed to be addicting for young people specifically. However, the end result is that the class of people who should be the most restless, virile, excited, and driven in society--kids age 12-20--is the most over-scheduled and exhausted. If you took a modern young person and stuck them on a reservation where the level of technology and pace of life matched the '80s and '90s, they'd start behaving like young people again.
  - dajt 3y ago
    In addition to how many distractions there are now - youtube & stream services, and much better games than in the 80s, the barrier to entry is so much higher. I had a C64 and only the docs that came with it, until I eventually found a couple of books on assembly, one not even for the C64. But even with that scarcity of info I was just desperate to know how it worked and how to make it do things. But look at how complex a computer is today! Even though there is endless info for free, it's just too difficult to get something fun going. Early PCs were still understandable, but todays GPUs etc are just a different world, and expectations are sky high when you see the current gen games. Even an 'indy pixel game' is no laughing matter to create.
    - quacked 3y ago
      Yeah, that's a good point. My introduction to coding class around 2010 covered enough material in a few lectures to take up an entire summer in 1990.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  And in my opinion, the most crucial part of the hacker spirit is ESR's own edict: "No problem should have to be solved twice." So I would convey the exact opposite aspect of the hacker spirit to the youth. Don't feel the need to read anything about history that isn't directly related to what you want to hack on. Black box liberally and dangerously and deal with the consequences as they appear. If reading history is what you want to do with your spare time, great, but let's be clear about what the actual heart of this avocation is.
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    I mean if you go for OSCP you end up in a virtual environment which many done before you (some with success). It is up to you if and how you approach such puzzle. And if your itch is writing X in Rust or Y in Python, why not? It is your choice... but you don't have to.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  Seems like claiming studying history (from before one is born) shouldn't be allowed. Some very nice music I learned from my parents, and a great series (The Prisoner).
  - ycombobreaker 3y ago
    "Be seeing you" remains a great way to say goodbye. Every now and then, somebody catches it.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What do you know about the history from before you were born? Punchcards? Vacuum tubes?
  - scarygliders 3y ago
    I learned about punch cards, when I discovered my high school in Scotland, in the 1980's, had card readers that were lying on a shelf unused for years. It was the Physics teacher who ran a computer club I'd joined in the school. We got to use those old HP "calculators" which were big bulky machines which had a display consisting of a single line of I think, 80 character LEDs, ran a form of BASIC, had a built in cassette tape reader (and writer) to load or store programs. The card reader attached to these clunky big things. I asked the physics teacher why they weren't used - I remember him saying it was because they weren't working. My 13 year old mind kind of fixated on them; the cards were in the same format as punched cards, except you marked them by drawing a single diagonal line across one of the rectangles which represented an ASCII character; each card had an array of such characters and you wrote a complete BASIC program by correctly marking each card. It took many such cards to write a program. Long story short, I got the card readers working again. The physics teacher just nodded his head - he was one of the old-skool kinda guys with a beard, who showed they were impressed, by displaying such stoic reactions. It was at that point that I learned about punched cards; basically the same principle but using punched holes rather than marking the individual rectangles. As I was born in 1969, I feel I had the priviledge of growing up during the various eras the article speaks of; by the time I attended high school I was growing up with Sinclair ZX81s (My first home computer), VIC-20s, C= 64s, Amiga 500s (My first Amiga). Amiga 1200s. My first PC was some 386 thingy I bought from a pal. This article reminds me of a lot of common knowledge I'd completely forgotten over the ensuing decades - such nostalgia!
    - dboreham 3y ago
      I think we went to the same school. Except my physics teacher had no beard.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    There used to be a fairly standard history that started with Jacquard loom punched cards, moved along to Hollerith's census processor, then through the early electronic versions of same, perhaps via a flashback to the telegraph. Then the first valve-based stored program computers after WWII ("incredibly unreliable"), and the transistor revolution which made reliable computing possible, via punched cards and DECtape. Then command-line timesharing, graphic systems, workstations, GUIs, and the rest, through to the 90s. It felt like a very logical and connected progression. Anyone in the business would be familiar with it, if only in overview. The UK had a preview of commodity computing with its cheap 8-bit micro scene in the early 80s. In the US computers remained far too expensive to be widely used. That seemed to change in the late 90s. Computing came to mean desktop and eventually handheld devices connected to the Internet. There were - still are - supercomputers, but they're a tiny niche. It became about commodity hardware appliances for commodity users with commodity software and tooling. The software also became appliance-ised. In a sense computing stopped having a history, in the same way other consumer goods like fridges, cars, and microwaves don't have a history. (Of course they do, but no one thinks about it while using them or buying them.) It was a huge and under-noted cultural shift. The next shift - AI - is already happening, and I'll guess we'll see the same lack of interest in "manual" computing history from the 1990s to the 2020s when AI-assisted computing becomes mundane and pervasive.
- gooob 3y ago
  it is very strange. i think the truth is that most people are just there for the money. they chose a college major not because they found it interesting, but because they were told that it pays a lot. i was born in 1996 and have been working as a software engineer for a little over 4 years. i got a degree in CompSci because i was always interested in it (first programming experience in 6th grade, before then i was familiarizing myself with other things i could do with the computer, like record and edit audio/video, make frame-by-frame animations). i find the history very interesting and almost vital to actually understanding some things. i have a colleague in his 60s who likes to ramble on and on about history of computers and programming and the like, and i am grateful for it.
bell-cot 3y ago
Old geezer suggestion: Try to tell them stories about people and the situations they were in - with the old hardware and tech as (at most) props and costumes. If they're that young, and not too weak in the social skills, they should pick up pretty soon that you're mostly teaching 'em about corporate culture, handling managers, gracefully dealing with sudden problems, etc.
- m463 3y ago
  I think many tech history books are dry, unless they talk about the people and personalities. https://www.folklore.org/ https://www.folklore.org/ https://steveblank.com/ https://steveblank.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Levy/dp/1449388396 https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le... https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-Competition/dp/0887308554 https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-C... https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/04/accidental-empires-part-1/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/04/accidental-empires-part-... (all the chapters are there)
jacobsenscott 3y ago
I suppose they are at work to work, and not to listen to you babble on about what you find interesting. Every minute you talk about your 9600 baud modem is either a minute later they need to work, or a minute less work they get done that day. Nobody needs to know any of this to run a k8s cluster, or whatever.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  I thought running k8s clusters was supposed to save you so much time and effort that you'd have some leisure time to enjoy? Say it's not so!!!
hcks 3y ago
Sorry, but (especially in engineering) old tech depreciates and becomes irrelevant.
angra_mainyu 3y ago
On the other hand, there's quite a few of us "young'uns" who are deeply fascinated with the hacker culture of old. Hopefully you do end up having such a mentee!

adamrezich 3y ago

> but largely I am finding that regaling the younger people with details from before they were born is not interesting because they were not here for it and have no connection to it. I don't understand why this attitude is so pervasive nowadays. in my opinion, curiosity about one's craft's history is a crucial part of the hacker spirit. I can't imagine, for example, never having used a landline, yet not finding phreaking to be incredibly interesting to learn more about, even though it's about as far from practical knowledge today as it could be. did we mess up somewhere and fail to convey this aspect of the hacker spirit to the youth? or are things just changing too rapidly?

mistrial9 3y ago
stackoverflow literally removed the mentorship stage for a generation
sockaddr 3y ago
I think things are more competitive and fast-paced nowadays than when we entered this space and so history and all of the details that come along with it aren't necessarily their first priority. I don't blame them. For example, When I was first getting into computers I felt like I had all the time in the world to perfect writing batch files and I could pour over a single magazine at a leisurely pace for weeks until the next one came out. Nowadays every time you use your face to unlock your magic pane of glass there's a language, a new framework, a new more impressive AI you can build your business on or some creepy guy trying to scan everyone's eyeballs, it's just different.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  I think there's also an aspect of computer programming having become more of a fashion than a craft, in many cases. game development used to be very difficult and people who worked in that field pushed the limits of what hardware and software could do. nowadays, free-to-download general-purpose engines make getting into "game development" extremely easy. web development became its own whole thing by means of frameworks and so forth, where now to get into it, you're more learning how specific frameworks and such work, rather than underlying engineering principles. how many people who program computers professionally for big tech companies are "hackers", these days, compared to one decade ago? two? three? surely the ratio has only decreased over time, as more and more people get into the field for purely pragmatic reasons (income, clout, etc.) than taking part in/engaging with "the hacker spirit". for better or worse, gates have not been kept, and now things are completely different than they once were.
  - dajt 3y ago
    30+ years ago I was programming for companies doing business software - ERP etc, and there were very few 'hackers' in the ranks. These guys and gals must have enjoyed programming at some point but I guess the software was so boring it just leached the joy out of it. Certainly by the mid-late 80s there were far more day job programmers around than hackers. In one company I managed to find a few fellow hackers, but the next one I worked at - nothing. It was awful. Luckily after that I managed to get more interesting work for a while, but then I spent too long in the wrong part of Oracle and again, I just couldn't find fun in the coding we were doing and no-one else could either. I think true hackers or enthusiasts have always been in the minority, at least since the late 70s I'd guess.
quacked 3y ago
> did we mess up somewhere and fail to convey this aspect of the hacker spirit to the youth? or are things just changing too rapidly? I think that young people today don't perceive themselves as having any free time, and so they treat new things as they're taught in school: optimize the solution, get your grade/get paid, and go back to the precious little free time you have available to enjoy your life. The disappearing free time is partially true, as the reach of the school environment grows and homework/extracurricular burdens increase. It's also partially imagined, because most young people burn 4-9 hours per day on their phones. It's not their fault, since phones are designed to be addicting for young people specifically. However, the end result is that the class of people who should be the most restless, virile, excited, and driven in society--kids age 12-20--is the most over-scheduled and exhausted. If you took a modern young person and stuck them on a reservation where the level of technology and pace of life matched the '80s and '90s, they'd start behaving like young people again.
- dajt 3y ago
  In addition to how many distractions there are now - youtube & stream services, and much better games than in the 80s, the barrier to entry is so much higher. I had a C64 and only the docs that came with it, until I eventually found a couple of books on assembly, one not even for the C64. But even with that scarcity of info I was just desperate to know how it worked and how to make it do things. But look at how complex a computer is today! Even though there is endless info for free, it's just too difficult to get something fun going. Early PCs were still understandable, but todays GPUs etc are just a different world, and expectations are sky high when you see the current gen games. Even an 'indy pixel game' is no laughing matter to create.
  - quacked 3y ago
    Yeah, that's a good point. My introduction to coding class around 2010 covered enough material in a few lectures to take up an entire summer in 1990.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
And in my opinion, the most crucial part of the hacker spirit is ESR's own edict: "No problem should have to be solved twice." So I would convey the exact opposite aspect of the hacker spirit to the youth. Don't feel the need to read anything about history that isn't directly related to what you want to hack on. Black box liberally and dangerously and deal with the consequences as they appear. If reading history is what you want to do with your spare time, great, but let's be clear about what the actual heart of this avocation is.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  I mean if you go for OSCP you end up in a virtual environment which many done before you (some with success). It is up to you if and how you approach such puzzle. And if your itch is writing X in Rust or Y in Python, why not? It is your choice... but you don't have to.
Fnoord 3y ago
Seems like claiming studying history (from before one is born) shouldn't be allowed. Some very nice music I learned from my parents, and a great series (The Prisoner).
- ycombobreaker 3y ago
  "Be seeing you" remains a great way to say goodbye. Every now and then, somebody catches it.
wolverine876 3y ago
What do you know about the history from before you were born? Punchcards? Vacuum tubes?
- scarygliders 3y ago
  I learned about punch cards, when I discovered my high school in Scotland, in the 1980's, had card readers that were lying on a shelf unused for years. It was the Physics teacher who ran a computer club I'd joined in the school. We got to use those old HP "calculators" which were big bulky machines which had a display consisting of a single line of I think, 80 character LEDs, ran a form of BASIC, had a built in cassette tape reader (and writer) to load or store programs. The card reader attached to these clunky big things. I asked the physics teacher why they weren't used - I remember him saying it was because they weren't working. My 13 year old mind kind of fixated on them; the cards were in the same format as punched cards, except you marked them by drawing a single diagonal line across one of the rectangles which represented an ASCII character; each card had an array of such characters and you wrote a complete BASIC program by correctly marking each card. It took many such cards to write a program. Long story short, I got the card readers working again. The physics teacher just nodded his head - he was one of the old-skool kinda guys with a beard, who showed they were impressed, by displaying such stoic reactions. It was at that point that I learned about punched cards; basically the same principle but using punched holes rather than marking the individual rectangles. As I was born in 1969, I feel I had the priviledge of growing up during the various eras the article speaks of; by the time I attended high school I was growing up with Sinclair ZX81s (My first home computer), VIC-20s, C= 64s, Amiga 500s (My first Amiga). Amiga 1200s. My first PC was some 386 thingy I bought from a pal. This article reminds me of a lot of common knowledge I'd completely forgotten over the ensuing decades - such nostalgia!
  - dboreham 3y ago
    I think we went to the same school. Except my physics teacher had no beard.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  There used to be a fairly standard history that started with Jacquard loom punched cards, moved along to Hollerith's census processor, then through the early electronic versions of same, perhaps via a flashback to the telegraph. Then the first valve-based stored program computers after WWII ("incredibly unreliable"), and the transistor revolution which made reliable computing possible, via punched cards and DECtape. Then command-line timesharing, graphic systems, workstations, GUIs, and the rest, through to the 90s. It felt like a very logical and connected progression. Anyone in the business would be familiar with it, if only in overview. The UK had a preview of commodity computing with its cheap 8-bit micro scene in the early 80s. In the US computers remained far too expensive to be widely used. That seemed to change in the late 90s. Computing came to mean desktop and eventually handheld devices connected to the Internet. There were - still are - supercomputers, but they're a tiny niche. It became about commodity hardware appliances for commodity users with commodity software and tooling. The software also became appliance-ised. In a sense computing stopped having a history, in the same way other consumer goods like fridges, cars, and microwaves don't have a history. (Of course they do, but no one thinks about it while using them or buying them.) It was a huge and under-noted cultural shift. The next shift - AI - is already happening, and I'll guess we'll see the same lack of interest in "manual" computing history from the 1990s to the 2020s when AI-assisted computing becomes mundane and pervasive.
gooob 3y ago
it is very strange. i think the truth is that most people are just there for the money. they chose a college major not because they found it interesting, but because they were told that it pays a lot. i was born in 1996 and have been working as a software engineer for a little over 4 years. i got a degree in CompSci because i was always interested in it (first programming experience in 6th grade, before then i was familiarizing myself with other things i could do with the computer, like record and edit audio/video, make frame-by-frame animations). i find the history very interesting and almost vital to actually understanding some things. i have a colleague in his 60s who likes to ramble on and on about history of computers and programming and the like, and i am grateful for it.

bell-cot 3y ago

Old geezer suggestion: Try to tell them stories about people and the situations they were in - with the old hardware and tech as (at most) props and costumes. If they're that young, and not too weak in the social skills, they should pick up pretty soon that you're mostly teaching 'em about corporate culture, handling managers, gracefully dealing with sudden problems, etc.

m463 3y ago
I think many tech history books are dry, unless they talk about the people and personalities. https://www.folklore.org/ https://www.folklore.org/ https://steveblank.com/ https://steveblank.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Levy/dp/1449388396 https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le... https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-Competition/dp/0887308554 https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-C... https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/04/accidental-empires-part-1/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/04/accidental-empires-part-... (all the chapters are there)

jacobsenscott 3y ago

I suppose they are at work to work, and not to listen to you babble on about what you find interesting. Every minute you talk about your 9600 baud modem is either a minute later they need to work, or a minute less work they get done that day. Nobody needs to know any of this to run a k8s cluster, or whatever.

DonHopkins 3y ago
I thought running k8s clusters was supposed to save you so much time and effort that you'd have some leisure time to enjoy? Say it's not so!!!

hcks 3y ago

Sorry, but (especially in engineering) old tech depreciates and becomes irrelevant.

angra_mainyu 3y ago

On the other hand, there's quite a few of us "young'uns" who are deeply fascinated with the hacker culture of old. Hopefully you do end up having such a mentee!