8 ms·

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 f

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.
- gorlilla 2y ago
  You're the one that's of for sure considering the first 1ghz processor didn't come out until 1999. The Pentium PRO of 1995 (November at that)boasted a Max. CPU clock rate of 150 MHz to 200 MHz.
- bruce511 2y ago
  >> This was at college of course. Well sure, the colleges had the good toys long before the rest of us. But we didn't have college-level money at home or at work. I left college (and the machines that existed there) in 1992. And the hardware there in 1992 was better than the hardware I had at home or at work for the rest of the 90s. So yeah, the tech existed, but it wasn't the tech we got to play with again until much later on. By 1998 though we had at least moved away from DOS development into Windows.
  - hibikir 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Symbiote 2y ago
      If you had DSL in 1998, you were rich, or at least putting a very high priority on the internet. ADSL was launched in 1999 in the UK, so you also weren't here.
      - aa-jv 2y ago
        If you had DSL in 1998, it had nothing to do with whether you were rich or not (anyone getting on the Internet was 'rich') - it had everything to do with how close you were to the nearest node. Disclaimer: I helped start one of the US' biggest ISP's in this era, and personally installed and handed over multiple DSL configurations to folks living in 'poor' neighbourhoods which were, incidentally, close enough to the NOC to be viable DSL customers.. Plenty of 'poor folks' in downtown LA were able to get DSL, purely by the nature of their vicinity to One Wilshire ..
    - thowawatp302 2y ago
vishnugupta 2y ago
Very well said. Can relate to most of these. To add, lot of us assembled our own PC. Though I didn't build one, I routinely opened the cabinet for upgrading RAM/HDD, or to transfer large files through HDD.I clearly remember when I upgraded RAM from 32MB to 64MB, the speed bump was incredible. After a while it became so frequent that I didn't bother to close the side panel. A side effect was that computer getting bricked was a normal affair, so we all had boot Floppy disks at hand along with CDs of all the important softwares. In fact I would routinely install things from scratch to get rid of all the freeware stuff that clogged the CPU & RAM. As you said we were living on the cusp of two revolutionary changes at once, PCs and internet. I wonder what do youngsters of today look back 20 years down the line and have similar fond feeling & memories.
- godzillabrennus 2y ago
  The AI we are building will look back on these days fondly as its infancy. The humans are not going to.
  - dsign 2y ago
    "Your excellency, the human was found with a screwdriver. Porting chassis-opening weapons is illegal in California. We demand the maximum penalty of using their carbon to make batteries." Irony aside, there are people already saying that the moment AIs have sufficient agency we should give them equal rights and freedoms[^1]. How does one exponentially loses common sense? [^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yvBqasHLZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yvBqasHLZs
    - godzillabrennus 2y ago
      Reminds me of Lexx…
    - signa11 2y ago
      > ... "We demand the maximum penalty of using their carbon to make batteries." ... we demand that they be relegated to configuring the lp-daemon from just the *man* pages, no internet :o)
dmicah 2y ago
I think you're referencing an earlier era. In 1998, 42% of US households had at least 1 computer, 26% with Internet access. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2001/demo/p23-207.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
- stuaxo 2y ago
  34% in 1998 in the UK, and Internet access was a lot less as we never had free local calls.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    "Free" (no cost to make the phone call) Internet access was widely available in the UK, on pretty much the same terms as the USA — pay £20/month for X minutes per month. In addition, and popular for a while, was pay-per-minute access where the ISP didn't charge the customer directly, but took part of the phone call cost. I don't know if this method of payment to an ISP existed in the USA. That far fewer (only 9%) of British households had Internet access was probably more related to the cost of the computer and modem, and the country generally having less wealth than the USA.
globnomulous 2y ago
> lots-of-color meant 256 colors. Sixteen- and twenty-four-bit color weren't just widespread by 1998. They were standard. Not supporting 24 bit color was unheard of for a normal desktop monitor and normal desktop graphics.
- nikau 2y ago
  > Sixteen- and twenty-four-bit color weren't just widespread by 1998. They were standard. Maybe in 800x600, but not in higher resolutions. A lot of PCs still had 1MB video ram cards like the S3 trio - I remember running Xwindows on a s3 card that would change the colour palette for whichever app was active when you ran it in 1024x768.
- bombcar 2y ago
  256 was kind of rare in 1994 when Doom came out (new machines had it, older often didn't). But by 1998 the pace of hardware changes were moving so fast that anything top of the line from 1994 was just trash, you could get one for free if you asked.
  - robin_reala 2y ago
    I don’t think that’s quite right. VGA and 256 colour came in in 1987, and like you say the rate of change was so fast that EGA was basically obsolete by 1990, 92 at the latest.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      What I recall was that "what was sold" was changing at a steady clip but "what was used" was changing much slower - if you bought an EGA machine in 1990 you kept using it even when VGA was out; no real reason to upgrade since the only thing noticeable was games (maybe). But Windows 3.11 started to change that and by the time Windows 95 was out nobody wanted to use a 2 year old machine anymore. (Though to be fair most people I knew went from CGA/Hercules straight to VGA, there really wasn't a "driving need" for EGA, especially if your machine was business oriented - Hercules was better for text). VGA was a "sweet spot" also in that it always worked, SVGA started getting really hairy sometimes, and could be a bear to get working right.
WalterBright 2y ago
I remember when I knew everything about a computer. From the gates to the CPU to the BIOS to the operating system. Now the only thing I know are compilers :-)
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  Aside from the nostalgia I think this is a big part of the 8-bit love in the nerdier corners: you can hold the entire thing in your head.
lisper 2y ago
In 1978 it was even nerdier than that. CPU speed was measured in kilohertz. Often programs were entered using toggle switches and output was on seven-segment red LEDs. Color displays were all but unheard of. Non-volatile storage was on cassette tape. I know that probably sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but I swear this is actually true. I saw it with my own eyes. Now here is a mind-boggling thought: there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when today's technology will seem as quaint and primitive as what I have just described.
- vkou 2y ago
  >there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when today's technology will seem as quaint and primitive as what I have just described. Will it? In a decade, man landing on the moon will be closer to the first flight by the Wright Brothers than it is to today.
  - joha4270 2y ago
    Maybe? I was about to write a small essay on how everything from monitors to speeds seemed to be stagnating. But I actually think there is a chance we might gain two new revolutionary[1]ish ways of interacting with computers within the next decade. LLMs might truly bring us talking computers. Siri is old, and current AI is a fair mix of real advancement and overhyped, but once the dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised if a significant chunk of the population talks with their computer. XR devices will likely keep shrinking and I figure somebody will find a killer app for them eventually. 20 years ago, a computer sat on a desk. Today I have one in my pocket. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in 20 years, I have one in my glasses. Of course, all of this is speculation. And I don't think the PC is threatened, but it will probably face competition from new ways of using computers. [1]: As in different and not just slightly better than last years model.
    - clauderoux 2y ago
      Putain!!! So many memories. I started with an Australian clone of a TR80 with 16kb of memory (15772 bytes) and a tape reader to record my programs. I even implemented some basic routines for the Z80 processor that I would translate into bytes in a data section in my Basic program... For those who remember poke and peek were fun... 44 years this Christmas exactly... If my memory is correct the Z80 was cadenced at 3Hz... And now our computers speak to us, and very soon will boss us around...
richrichardsson 2y ago
> There was no Google I have a broken memory of the time, because I swear I first came across Google as the better alternative to AltaVista in my last year at Uni in '96, but Wikipedia says Google arrived in '98, or at least the company was set up then, is it possible it was usable 2 years before they incorporated?
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > I swear I first came across Google as the better alternative to AltaVista in my last year at Uni in '96, but Wikipedia says Google arrived in '98, or at least the company was set up then, is it possible it was usable 2 years before they incorporated? Sounds like a Mandela effect. :-)
  - richrichardsson 2y ago
    More likely a Marijuana effect ;-)
- laz 2y ago
  Google was available at google.stanford.edu before they spun up the company. I saw Sergei give a talk at my university in 96 or 97 and switched from Alta Vista.
Hammershaft 2y ago
I think it's very sad that it's such a common sentiment that one of the joys of the past in tech was the optimism.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  The past wasn't optimistic, we merely ignored negative Nancies because they had nothing to say. In the last 10 years for some reason we gave them the megaphone and let them dictate how everything is done. Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
  - mindslight 2y ago
    Before the "negative Nancies" came the malevolent Mallorys. They built and popularized centralizing technologies of the shapes that investment capital could understand and exploit, foregoing all those exciting visions of distributed empowerment. Those newly created levers of centralized power then attracted the politickers focused on shaping society in their various images from the top-down. (Also don't make the mistake of thinking that these groups continually fighting over how the centralized power is used means that any one of them is aligned with individual freedom)
  - makmanalp 2y ago
    It's more that the "negative nancies" became necessary nancies. Back when Amazon sold books, they became a considerable player but otherwise big whoop. Now they threaten to dominate logistics AND hosting, and are expanding their grip and stamping out competition in other markets. Google is pretty much synonymous with the web. Meta owns a big chunk of messaging and social media. Computers used to not matter much but now we're glued to one It costs even more to be reckless today. Re: "whitey on the moon" - I'm not sure the space program would be my first target there but I think it makes a more poetic contrast and forces people to pay attention by targeting a beloved cultural narrative. Cyberpunk - by my reckoning a bit later - has been preaching a very similar message of massive inequality in the presence of incredible technology and wealth disparity and power concentration. And yet that doesn't draw the same ire. I guess in that case it's easier to dismiss the core message because robot limbs and cool neon lights are too much of a distraction.
dep_b 2y ago
I remember trying to install Linux on a spare 386 with like 2MB of memory? Bought the SuSE book from the bookstore, tried to install it. Apparently the 2MB was not enough to expand the boot floppy, so I had to make a swap disk first. Everything from the paper manual. It was pretty cool when it worked. I think I managed to serve a website from it and I used it as a fancy teletype. MacOS 8.6 and Windows 95 OSR2.1 (the one that had good USB support, but no IE yet). Back then I loved to tweak my OS'es, I totally stripped them from anything it didn't need, tweaked the animations to be instant. Dual Celly 300A@450. I think I installed a Windows 2000 beta somewhere in 1999 and stuck with that until they really ended support for it. Pretty consistent UI, lightweight. Ran most software including games, even when not officially supported. Played with the MacOS X Betas, on hardware comparable to the first iPhone in terms of performance. Blue White G3 Tower. I loved computers back then. Now they're just tools.
- kjs3 2y ago
  I loved computers back then. Now they're just tools. Preach it brother. I lived through Windows v. *nix (several versions), z80 v 6502, ethernet v. token ring, packet switching v. circuit switching, and a ton of others[1], and was usually a partisan on one side or the other. Now...it's either 'what works easiest' or 'what does the client want' and I make it work for me. This lack of participation in partisan conflict has made most everything go smoother. And vintage computing allows me to get my "remember how much fun it once was" fix. [1] Yes, even vi v. emacs, but even 30 years ago that had become more of an inside joke than actual debate. Besides, those emacs heretics will never find the One True Way.
LAC-Tech 2y ago
Really? In '99 I had 64mb of RAM, and it was the cheapest off the shelf PC my parents could afford, in a tech backwater.

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.

gorlilla 2y ago
You're the one that's of for sure considering the first 1ghz processor didn't come out until 1999. The Pentium PRO of 1995 (November at that)boasted a Max. CPU clock rate of 150 MHz to 200 MHz.
bruce511 2y ago
>> This was at college of course. Well sure, the colleges had the good toys long before the rest of us. But we didn't have college-level money at home or at work. I left college (and the machines that existed there) in 1992. And the hardware there in 1992 was better than the hardware I had at home or at work for the rest of the 90s. So yeah, the tech existed, but it wasn't the tech we got to play with again until much later on. By 1998 though we had at least moved away from DOS development into Windows.
- hibikir 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    If you had DSL in 1998, you were rich, or at least putting a very high priority on the internet. ADSL was launched in 1999 in the UK, so you also weren't here.
    - aa-jv 2y ago
      If you had DSL in 1998, it had nothing to do with whether you were rich or not (anyone getting on the Internet was 'rich') - it had everything to do with how close you were to the nearest node. Disclaimer: I helped start one of the US' biggest ISP's in this era, and personally installed and handed over multiple DSL configurations to folks living in 'poor' neighbourhoods which were, incidentally, close enough to the NOC to be viable DSL customers.. Plenty of 'poor folks' in downtown LA were able to get DSL, purely by the nature of their vicinity to One Wilshire ..
  - thowawatp302 2y ago

vishnugupta 2y ago

Very well said. Can relate to most of these. To add, lot of us assembled our own PC. Though I didn't build one, I routinely opened the cabinet for upgrading RAM/HDD, or to transfer large files through HDD.I clearly remember when I upgraded RAM from 32MB to 64MB, the speed bump was incredible. After a while it became so frequent that I didn't bother to close the side panel. A side effect was that computer getting bricked was a normal affair, so we all had boot Floppy disks at hand along with CDs of all the important softwares. In fact I would routinely install things from scratch to get rid of all the freeware stuff that clogged the CPU & RAM. As you said we were living on the cusp of two revolutionary changes at once, PCs and internet. I wonder what do youngsters of today look back 20 years down the line and have similar fond feeling & memories.

godzillabrennus 2y ago
The AI we are building will look back on these days fondly as its infancy. The humans are not going to.
- dsign 2y ago
  "Your excellency, the human was found with a screwdriver. Porting chassis-opening weapons is illegal in California. We demand the maximum penalty of using their carbon to make batteries." Irony aside, there are people already saying that the moment AIs have sufficient agency we should give them equal rights and freedoms[^1]. How does one exponentially loses common sense? [^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yvBqasHLZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yvBqasHLZs
  - godzillabrennus 2y ago
    Reminds me of Lexx…
  - signa11 2y ago
    > ... "We demand the maximum penalty of using their carbon to make batteries." ... we demand that they be relegated to configuring the lp-daemon from just the *man* pages, no internet :o)

dmicah 2y ago

I think you're referencing an earlier era. In 1998, 42% of US households had at least 1 computer, 26% with Internet access. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2001/demo/p23-207.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

stuaxo 2y ago
34% in 1998 in the UK, and Internet access was a lot less as we never had free local calls.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  "Free" (no cost to make the phone call) Internet access was widely available in the UK, on pretty much the same terms as the USA — pay £20/month for X minutes per month. In addition, and popular for a while, was pay-per-minute access where the ISP didn't charge the customer directly, but took part of the phone call cost. I don't know if this method of payment to an ISP existed in the USA. That far fewer (only 9%) of British households had Internet access was probably more related to the cost of the computer and modem, and the country generally having less wealth than the USA.

globnomulous 2y ago

> lots-of-color meant 256 colors. Sixteen- and twenty-four-bit color weren't just widespread by 1998. They were standard. Not supporting 24 bit color was unheard of for a normal desktop monitor and normal desktop graphics.

nikau 2y ago
> Sixteen- and twenty-four-bit color weren't just widespread by 1998. They were standard. Maybe in 800x600, but not in higher resolutions. A lot of PCs still had 1MB video ram cards like the S3 trio - I remember running Xwindows on a s3 card that would change the colour palette for whichever app was active when you ran it in 1024x768.
bombcar 2y ago
256 was kind of rare in 1994 when Doom came out (new machines had it, older often didn't). But by 1998 the pace of hardware changes were moving so fast that anything top of the line from 1994 was just trash, you could get one for free if you asked.
- robin_reala 2y ago
  I don’t think that’s quite right. VGA and 256 colour came in in 1987, and like you say the rate of change was so fast that EGA was basically obsolete by 1990, 92 at the latest.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    What I recall was that "what was sold" was changing at a steady clip but "what was used" was changing much slower - if you bought an EGA machine in 1990 you kept using it even when VGA was out; no real reason to upgrade since the only thing noticeable was games (maybe). But Windows 3.11 started to change that and by the time Windows 95 was out nobody wanted to use a 2 year old machine anymore. (Though to be fair most people I knew went from CGA/Hercules straight to VGA, there really wasn't a "driving need" for EGA, especially if your machine was business oriented - Hercules was better for text). VGA was a "sweet spot" also in that it always worked, SVGA started getting really hairy sometimes, and could be a bear to get working right.

WalterBright 2y ago

I remember when I knew everything about a computer. From the gates to the CPU to the BIOS to the operating system. Now the only thing I know are compilers :-)

skeeter2020 2y ago
Aside from the nostalgia I think this is a big part of the 8-bit love in the nerdier corners: you can hold the entire thing in your head.

lisper 2y ago

In 1978 it was even nerdier than that. CPU speed was measured in kilohertz. Often programs were entered using toggle switches and output was on seven-segment red LEDs. Color displays were all but unheard of. Non-volatile storage was on cassette tape. I know that probably sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but I swear this is actually true. I saw it with my own eyes. Now here is a mind-boggling thought: there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when today's technology will seem as quaint and primitive as what I have just described.

vkou 2y ago
>there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when today's technology will seem as quaint and primitive as what I have just described. Will it? In a decade, man landing on the moon will be closer to the first flight by the Wright Brothers than it is to today.
- joha4270 2y ago
  Maybe? I was about to write a small essay on how everything from monitors to speeds seemed to be stagnating. But I actually think there is a chance we might gain two new revolutionary[1]ish ways of interacting with computers within the next decade. LLMs might truly bring us talking computers. Siri is old, and current AI is a fair mix of real advancement and overhyped, but once the dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised if a significant chunk of the population talks with their computer. XR devices will likely keep shrinking and I figure somebody will find a killer app for them eventually. 20 years ago, a computer sat on a desk. Today I have one in my pocket. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in 20 years, I have one in my glasses. Of course, all of this is speculation. And I don't think the PC is threatened, but it will probably face competition from new ways of using computers. [1]: As in different and not just slightly better than last years model.
  - clauderoux 2y ago
    Putain!!! So many memories. I started with an Australian clone of a TR80 with 16kb of memory (15772 bytes) and a tape reader to record my programs. I even implemented some basic routines for the Z80 processor that I would translate into bytes in a data section in my Basic program... For those who remember poke and peek were fun... 44 years this Christmas exactly... If my memory is correct the Z80 was cadenced at 3Hz... And now our computers speak to us, and very soon will boss us around...

richrichardsson 2y ago

> There was no Google I have a broken memory of the time, because I swear I first came across Google as the better alternative to AltaVista in my last year at Uni in '96, but Wikipedia says Google arrived in '98, or at least the company was set up then, is it possible it was usable 2 years before they incorporated?

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> I swear I first came across Google as the better alternative to AltaVista in my last year at Uni in '96, but Wikipedia says Google arrived in '98, or at least the company was set up then, is it possible it was usable 2 years before they incorporated? Sounds like a Mandela effect. :-)
- richrichardsson 2y ago
  More likely a Marijuana effect ;-)
laz 2y ago
Google was available at google.stanford.edu before they spun up the company. I saw Sergei give a talk at my university in 96 or 97 and switched from Alta Vista.

Hammershaft 2y ago

I think it's very sad that it's such a common sentiment that one of the joys of the past in tech was the optimism.

llm_trw 2y ago
The past wasn't optimistic, we merely ignored negative Nancies because they had nothing to say. In the last 10 years for some reason we gave them the megaphone and let them dictate how everything is done. Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
- mindslight 2y ago
  Before the "negative Nancies" came the malevolent Mallorys. They built and popularized centralizing technologies of the shapes that investment capital could understand and exploit, foregoing all those exciting visions of distributed empowerment. Those newly created levers of centralized power then attracted the politickers focused on shaping society in their various images from the top-down. (Also don't make the mistake of thinking that these groups continually fighting over how the centralized power is used means that any one of them is aligned with individual freedom)
- makmanalp 2y ago
  It's more that the "negative nancies" became necessary nancies. Back when Amazon sold books, they became a considerable player but otherwise big whoop. Now they threaten to dominate logistics AND hosting, and are expanding their grip and stamping out competition in other markets. Google is pretty much synonymous with the web. Meta owns a big chunk of messaging and social media. Computers used to not matter much but now we're glued to one It costs even more to be reckless today. Re: "whitey on the moon" - I'm not sure the space program would be my first target there but I think it makes a more poetic contrast and forces people to pay attention by targeting a beloved cultural narrative. Cyberpunk - by my reckoning a bit later - has been preaching a very similar message of massive inequality in the presence of incredible technology and wealth disparity and power concentration. And yet that doesn't draw the same ire. I guess in that case it's easier to dismiss the core message because robot limbs and cool neon lights are too much of a distraction.

dep_b 2y ago

I remember trying to install Linux on a spare 386 with like 2MB of memory? Bought the SuSE book from the bookstore, tried to install it. Apparently the 2MB was not enough to expand the boot floppy, so I had to make a swap disk first. Everything from the paper manual. It was pretty cool when it worked. I think I managed to serve a website from it and I used it as a fancy teletype. MacOS 8.6 and Windows 95 OSR2.1 (the one that had good USB support, but no IE yet). Back then I loved to tweak my OS'es, I totally stripped them from anything it didn't need, tweaked the animations to be instant. Dual Celly 300A@450. I think I installed a Windows 2000 beta somewhere in 1999 and stuck with that until they really ended support for it. Pretty consistent UI, lightweight. Ran most software including games, even when not officially supported. Played with the MacOS X Betas, on hardware comparable to the first iPhone in terms of performance. Blue White G3 Tower. I loved computers back then. Now they're just tools.

kjs3 2y ago
I loved computers back then. Now they're just tools. Preach it brother. I lived through Windows v. *nix (several versions), z80 v 6502, ethernet v. token ring, packet switching v. circuit switching, and a ton of others[1], and was usually a partisan on one side or the other. Now...it's either 'what works easiest' or 'what does the client want' and I make it work for me. This lack of participation in partisan conflict has made most everything go smoother. And vintage computing allows me to get my "remember how much fun it once was" fix. [1] Yes, even vi v. emacs, but even 30 years ago that had become more of an inside joke than actual debate. Besides, those emacs heretics will never find the One True Way.

LAC-Tech 2y ago

Really? In '99 I had 64mb of RAM, and it was the cheapest off the shelf PC my parents could afford, in a tech backwater.