9 ms·

Fun times; I knew some of those people. Tech felt more nerdy and optimistic. It had its share of problems, but I miss some of the idealism.

by davidw 2y ago

advael 2y ago
Optimistic times always end when people who won power in them fight to hold on to increasingly more of it, and tend to only come back once they fail, stop, or fall.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Consider that the times were optimistic for those who were interested, motivated, capable, and in a position (even geographic) to learn about computers. But there were probably many people for whom the same time was not as optimistic, perhaps due to being automated or outsourced. Probably true right now too, some are in optimistic times, and others not. Perhaps the proportions of the two groups varies.
  - advael 2y ago
    Generally when people refer to the "times" they are discussing the vibes over some aggregate. Zoom in enough on anything and you start to see different individuals with unique circumstances, but this doesn't make futile the entire endeavor of observing larger patterns
idiotsecant 2y ago
I feel like maybe there are some parallels with the 60s counterculture movements. The 'high water mark' speech from fear and loathing comes to mind.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- schoen 2y ago
  My friend Nick, with whom I worked on Linux stuff in this era, actually quoted that speech in reference to the free software scene sometime around the year 2000! I think you're the first person since then I've seen mention it in this context.
- yard2010 2y ago
  "Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    He wrote a lot but this, I think, is the most beautiful. He was one of God's own prototypes, to be sure.
nailer 2y ago
It was very funny a few years later in the early 2000 Linux started getting games and quite good quality desktop user interfaces. Lindows even had the first version of an App Store. However, everyone was so busy thinking about being a better version of Windows and Mac that for the most part we didn’t think about phones. Windows and make themselves fell by the wayside to iOS and android.
- Elv13 2y ago
  Not really. Maemo/N900 and OpenMoko existed and worked well enough. The problem I think is more than Meego/Mer/Moblin was supposed to be equally open, but a customer ready version of that idea. It was delayed over and over again. By the time it existed, it was no longer a pure X11 based Linux distribution and more of an (too) early take on Wayland. It was also so late Microsoft made a powergrab and managed to kill it. Ubuntu mobile (and to some extent BlackBerry10/WebOS) then came and tried to take that crown, but by that time iOS and Android were too entrenched. Ubuntu mobile was also MIR/LibHybris, you can't really build your own DE/WM on it since its a monolith. So the FLOSS community waited/wasted 6 years waiting for some building blocks (and the hardware to go with them) to be ready and were left with nothing. By that time the ship had sailed and the world depended on "apps" to interact with everything and FLOSS can't challenge it.
  - dale_glass 2y ago
    I had a N900 and was very fond of it, but it was really a prototype. Part done before its time, part a type of system that wouldn't have worked for normal people long term. The N900 was more or less a tiny computer running Debian. With 256MB RAM, and swapping on flash. It was way too low spec to run reliably like that, you quickly ran into swap death. And it had none of the niceties of Android's memory management, having apps designed to be stopped as needed. Security-wise it was also bad, it was just a normal Linux box, so banking apps would be a terrible idea. If it didn't get killed, I wonder how would they have polished it up for public consumption.
    - holowoodman 2y ago
bruce511 2y ago
In 1998 it was a LOT more nerdy. To some of you youngsters now you'd be amazed at the primitiveness of the hardware. It was still in the "first adopter" stage from a commercial point of view. CPU speed was measured in Mhz not Ghz. CPUs had one core. Memory was measured in MB (not GB) and machines with memory of 32MB or less was the norm. A big-screen was 1024x768 (and most folk didn't have that) and lots-of-color meant 256 colors. The publically-accessable internet was in its infancy. Connection was through dial ip modem. There was no Google, no social media, no news media. Most of the businesses we sold software to, we had to source the hardware for them as well. Computers in the home were "common" (but not really used for much apart from games.) And by common I'm thinking 10% or so, not 50%. So yeah, still very nerdy. You still needed a good grasp of the command line, config of new machines was tricky, IRQ numbers were a thing. My best work was in Assembly language. And very optimistic. It was clear the best was still to come, and the flaws were seen, but improving all the time. Every year brought new hardware, new software, and new "I didn't know a computer could do that). Plus we were younger, so much younger than today. The world was our oyster. We might have been nerds, but we had gun working AND got paid to do so. It was a special time and I feel privileged to have lived through it.
- asveikau 2y ago
  > machines with memory of 32MB or less was the norm My memory of 1998 is that 64mb-128mb was common by then. Around then my main machine had 128mb, until 2001 when I switched to 256mb and a 1ghz cpu. I also had an older machine with 8mb that was given to me for free. I recompiled OpenBSD to exclude PCI support to get it to stop swapping, then it was pretty usable as a headless machine.
- grogenaut 2y ago
  I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95. I had 100mb internet on lan and multi t3. Google was around before public launch in 98. You're a few years off. In 98 I had a sgi visual workstatuon with 4gb ram and 50gb HDD and was on the same hub as the t3s. This was at college of course. I had dsl in 00 and it was as fast as campus. My mom was the first non-commercial install in STL (she was kinda a techie but also a good mom to a cs student kid). Summer of 95 I convinced her to get dialup so I could learn about this internet thing I figured would be big. I was about 2 years too late for that wave. But yes things were way more primitive and the learning curve was high. I had to spend several hours on the phone with the ISP to get on dialup on Mac. They onboarded people on campus manually and sold Ethernet cards back then.
internet_points 2y ago
Yeah, back in the day you'd be considered tin-foil hat if you thought you were being tracked and surveilled online. These days, you're tin-foil hat if you think you can avoid it. Microsoft was the big bad wolf, but at the time, most of what they did that was so horrible was capture market share. You could still use a computing device and then leave it alone and it would leave you alone, it wasn't trying to constantly ping you and notify you and make you feel left out and use all kinds of dark patterns to feed the addiction. These days, computing devices feel more like trickster adversaries than clunky-but-useful tools.
- Clubber 2y ago
  >back in the day you'd be considered tin-foil hat if you thought you were being tracked and surveilled online. Not so fast. They've been at it for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
elzbardico 2y ago
At this time even management was kind of nerdy. It was a time when you could be in some place outside the big meccas like SV and start a reasonably succesful company around simply developing some software package and selling it to a small to midsized companies in your region. Even in big non-tech companies, tech people kind of were left alone in a distant building and as long as you had a suit and a tie for the very ocasional meetings with the civilized portion of your company you were mostly left alone. Then, the business people started to slowly encroach into our domain, the project management people, their processess. I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people. Then the marketing consolidated and concentrated, and it was never the same since then.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people. If you're in a hiring position it's important to be very, very selective about who you hire into any engineering management or even more agile-specific roles. I remembering interviewing for an "agile coach" in a previous role - the CTO thought we needed one - and the first two or three were basically the same: all had their acronyms and their flavours of how they'd memorised agile literature. Then one guy came in who did know all that, but was also ex-British Army and had a load of practical, insightful things to say. And that's who we picked, and he later became the head of engineering. Useful agile knowledge is practical and insightful. It's not theory.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    If you're in a hiring position and hire anyone who uses agile as anything but a way to blend in with all the bullshit today you should quit and do something more productive with your life, like watching paint dry.
    - thrw42A8N 2y ago
      If you're in a hiring position and don't even know what "agile" means, please go do a more appropriate job.

Fun times; I knew some of those people. Tech felt more nerdy and optimistic. It had its share of problems, but I miss some of the idealism.

by davidw 2y ago

Fun times; I knew some of those people. Tech felt more nerdy and optimistic. It had its share of problems, but I miss some of the idealism.

advael 2y ago

Optimistic times always end when people who won power in them fight to hold on to increasingly more of it, and tend to only come back once they fail, stop, or fall.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
Consider that the times were optimistic for those who were interested, motivated, capable, and in a position (even geographic) to learn about computers. But there were probably many people for whom the same time was not as optimistic, perhaps due to being automated or outsourced. Probably true right now too, some are in optimistic times, and others not. Perhaps the proportions of the two groups varies.
- advael 2y ago
  Generally when people refer to the "times" they are discussing the vibes over some aggregate. Zoom in enough on anything and you start to see different individuals with unique circumstances, but this doesn't make futile the entire endeavor of observing larger patterns

idiotsecant 2y ago

I feel like maybe there are some parallels with the 60s counterculture movements. The 'high water mark' speech from fear and loathing comes to mind.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
schoen 2y ago
My friend Nick, with whom I worked on Linux stuff in this era, actually quoted that speech in reference to the free software scene sometime around the year 2000! I think you're the first person since then I've seen mention it in this context.
yard2010 2y ago
"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  He wrote a lot but this, I think, is the most beautiful. He was one of God's own prototypes, to be sure.

nailer 2y ago

It was very funny a few years later in the early 2000 Linux started getting games and quite good quality desktop user interfaces. Lindows even had the first version of an App Store. However, everyone was so busy thinking about being a better version of Windows and Mac that for the most part we didn’t think about phones. Windows and make themselves fell by the wayside to iOS and android.

Elv13 2y ago
Not really. Maemo/N900 and OpenMoko existed and worked well enough. The problem I think is more than Meego/Mer/Moblin was supposed to be equally open, but a customer ready version of that idea. It was delayed over and over again. By the time it existed, it was no longer a pure X11 based Linux distribution and more of an (too) early take on Wayland. It was also so late Microsoft made a powergrab and managed to kill it. Ubuntu mobile (and to some extent BlackBerry10/WebOS) then came and tried to take that crown, but by that time iOS and Android were too entrenched. Ubuntu mobile was also MIR/LibHybris, you can't really build your own DE/WM on it since its a monolith. So the FLOSS community waited/wasted 6 years waiting for some building blocks (and the hardware to go with them) to be ready and were left with nothing. By that time the ship had sailed and the world depended on "apps" to interact with everything and FLOSS can't challenge it.
- dale_glass 2y ago
  I had a N900 and was very fond of it, but it was really a prototype. Part done before its time, part a type of system that wouldn't have worked for normal people long term. The N900 was more or less a tiny computer running Debian. With 256MB RAM, and swapping on flash. It was way too low spec to run reliably like that, you quickly ran into swap death. And it had none of the niceties of Android's memory management, having apps designed to be stopped as needed. Security-wise it was also bad, it was just a normal Linux box, so banking apps would be a terrible idea. If it didn't get killed, I wonder how would they have polished it up for public consumption.
  - holowoodman 2y ago

bruce511 2y ago

In 1998 it was a LOT more nerdy. To some of you youngsters now you'd be amazed at the primitiveness of the hardware. It was still in the "first adopter" stage from a commercial point of view. CPU speed was measured in Mhz not Ghz. CPUs had one core. Memory was measured in MB (not GB) and machines with memory of 32MB or less was the norm. A big-screen was 1024x768 (and most folk didn't have that) and lots-of-color meant 256 colors. The publically-accessable internet was in its infancy. Connection was through dial ip modem. There was no Google, no social media, no news media. Most of the businesses we sold software to, we had to source the hardware for them as well. Computers in the home were "common" (but not really used for much apart from games.) And by common I'm thinking 10% or so, not 50%. So yeah, still very nerdy. You still needed a good grasp of the command line, config of new machines was tricky, IRQ numbers were a thing. My best work was in Assembly language. And very optimistic. It was clear the best was still to come, and the flaws were seen, but improving all the time. Every year brought new hardware, new software, and new "I didn't know a computer could do that). Plus we were younger, so much younger than today. The world was our oyster. We might have been nerds, but we had gun working AND got paid to do so. It was a special time and I feel privileged to have lived through it.

asveikau 2y ago
> machines with memory of 32MB or less was the norm My memory of 1998 is that 64mb-128mb was common by then. Around then my main machine had 128mb, until 2001 when I switched to 256mb and a 1ghz cpu. I also had an older machine with 8mb that was given to me for free. I recompiled OpenBSD to exclude PCI support to get it to stop swapping, then it was pretty usable as a headless machine.
grogenaut 2y ago
I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95. I had 100mb internet on lan and multi t3. Google was around before public launch in 98. You're a few years off. In 98 I had a sgi visual workstatuon with 4gb ram and 50gb HDD and was on the same hub as the t3s. This was at college of course. I had dsl in 00 and it was as fast as campus. My mom was the first non-commercial install in STL (she was kinda a techie but also a good mom to a cs student kid). Summer of 95 I convinced her to get dialup so I could learn about this internet thing I figured would be big. I was about 2 years too late for that wave. But yes things were way more primitive and the learning curve was high. I had to spend several hours on the phone with the ISP to get on dialup on Mac. They onboarded people on campus manually and sold Ethernet cards back then.

internet_points 2y ago

Yeah, back in the day you'd be considered tin-foil hat if you thought you were being tracked and surveilled online. These days, you're tin-foil hat if you think you can avoid it. Microsoft was the big bad wolf, but at the time, most of what they did that was so horrible was capture market share. You could still use a computing device and then leave it alone and it would leave you alone, it wasn't trying to constantly ping you and notify you and make you feel left out and use all kinds of dark patterns to feed the addiction. These days, computing devices feel more like trickster adversaries than clunky-but-useful tools.

Clubber 2y ago
>back in the day you'd be considered tin-foil hat if you thought you were being tracked and surveilled online. Not so fast. They've been at it for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

elzbardico 2y ago

At this time even management was kind of nerdy. It was a time when you could be in some place outside the big meccas like SV and start a reasonably succesful company around simply developing some software package and selling it to a small to midsized companies in your region. Even in big non-tech companies, tech people kind of were left alone in a distant building and as long as you had a suit and a tie for the very ocasional meetings with the civilized portion of your company you were mostly left alone. Then, the business people started to slowly encroach into our domain, the project management people, their processess. I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people. Then the marketing consolidated and concentrated, and it was never the same since then.

robertlagrant 2y ago
> I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people. If you're in a hiring position it's important to be very, very selective about who you hire into any engineering management or even more agile-specific roles. I remembering interviewing for an "agile coach" in a previous role - the CTO thought we needed one - and the first two or three were basically the same: all had their acronyms and their flavours of how they'd memorised agile literature. Then one guy came in who did know all that, but was also ex-British Army and had a load of practical, insightful things to say. And that's who we picked, and he later became the head of engineering. Useful agile knowledge is practical and insightful. It's not theory.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  If you're in a hiring position and hire anyone who uses agile as anything but a way to blend in with all the bullshit today you should quit and do something more productive with your life, like watching paint dry.
  - thrw42A8N 2y ago
    If you're in a hiring position and don't even know what "agile" means, please go do a more appropriate job.