3 ms·

Everytime I read about that part of the history I feel I missed the brightest fire in the valley. There are fires nowadays too but none of them keeps the "perso

Everytime I read about that part of the history I feel I missed the brightest fire in the valley. There are fires nowadays too but none of them keeps the "personal" prefix.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
Yeah, when I arrived in 1995, it was like arriving among the glowing embers. There were still nerdy bookstores, Disk Drive Depot, Weirdstuff Warehouse, surplus and electronics recycling centers where you could geek-browse for rare numerical display components (or unusual vacuum tubes).... Slowly, over the 27 years or so living there I saw even those embers slowly die down and go out. (Fry's went from nerd superstore to just an also-ran normie superstore — and then it and Weirdstuff and many of the other places I mentioned closed down.) I miss that old valley. I might also be missing my youth at the time, my optimism at the time....
- hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
  Yeah, feels the same. Back in the mid 90s I'm in a third world country where not many people own PCs but I was fortunately to play with a Pentium because my father is a Math professor. I was probably among the first ones to use Windows 95 (it was a beta or some sort of pre-release version I believe, AND localized already). As you, I have the same feeling towards computer software stores, bookstores and other small shops in my local. I used to grab whatever software they offered (my parents forbade me to play any game) and tinkered with the development tools. Many of my classmates were very into gaming (back then consoles were pretty expensive for ordinary families) and some smarter kids got into game modification using PC Tools. I never managed to give myself a solid CS education and only entered the industry a few years ago, when I finally mustered the courage to teach myself C++. Anyway it was a great time for whoever touched by the fire. Now it's all gone. I might install DOSBOX on Rpi to give my kid a "DOS Machine" so that he could relive the history, but that's purely educational purpose.

Everytime I read about that part of the history I feel I missed the brightest fire in the valley. There are fires nowadays too but none of them keeps the "personal" prefix.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Yeah, when I arrived in 1995, it was like arriving among the glowing embers. There were still nerdy bookstores, Disk Drive Depot, Weirdstuff Warehouse, surplus and electronics recycling centers where you could geek-browse for rare numerical display components (or unusual vacuum tubes).... Slowly, over the 27 years or so living there I saw even those embers slowly die down and go out. (Fry's went from nerd superstore to just an also-ran normie superstore — and then it and Weirdstuff and many of the other places I mentioned closed down.) I miss that old valley. I might also be missing my youth at the time, my optimism at the time....

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
Yeah, feels the same. Back in the mid 90s I'm in a third world country where not many people own PCs but I was fortunately to play with a Pentium because my father is a Math professor. I was probably among the first ones to use Windows 95 (it was a beta or some sort of pre-release version I believe, AND localized already). As you, I have the same feeling towards computer software stores, bookstores and other small shops in my local. I used to grab whatever software they offered (my parents forbade me to play any game) and tinkered with the development tools. Many of my classmates were very into gaming (back then consoles were pretty expensive for ordinary families) and some smarter kids got into game modification using PC Tools. I never managed to give myself a solid CS education and only entered the industry a few years ago, when I finally mustered the courage to teach myself C++. Anyway it was a great time for whoever touched by the fire. Now it's all gone. I might install DOSBOX on Rpi to give my kid a "DOS Machine" so that he could relive the history, but that's purely educational purpose.