Maybe I'm just getting old and it's all nostalgia but I had exactly the same experiences during the 80s and 90s. I also thought web forums where a big step back

Maybe I'm just getting old and it's all nostalgia but I had exactly the same experiences during the 80s and 90s. I also thought web forums where a big step backwards when compared to usenet groups. In pre-internet times I loved reading computer magazines, sure they where full of ads and hyped some bullshit products but at least there where no clickbait titles or AI generated articles. There was some real useful content. You also kind of knew all the authors of the magazines and their style. Software piracy also was a physical process, we shared floppy disks on the schoolyard and exchanged "arcane" knowledge of how to unpack it (arj / pkzip). I also often wonder if as a civilization we really need this enormous speedup of everything. We humans can barely handle multitasking. We can compile huge amounts of ultra complex code insanely fast but we can't think faster to come up with the ideas and also can't handle complexity in our minds better than before. On the contrary, I often feel urged to rush software development.