5 ms·

Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

57 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

alephnerd 2y ago
> Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone Or maybe you were just younger? It's not like subcultures don't exist anymore - older people just don't know how to enter them. And it'll happen to us eventually as well. And if we're honest, the democratization of technology was a net positive globally - there have been plenty of negatives like social media but a lot of positives as well like Digital Public Infra.
- armada651 2y ago
  > Consumerist convenience, walled gardens, corporate risk-adversity and shallow aesthetical homogenization have replaced the sprawling hobbyist collective that once made up the bulk of personal computers and their users. They should definitely go to a Chaos Computer Club event like CCC, because the "sprawling hobbyist collective" is still very much alive. If you want the kind of experience he's waxing lyrical about then go join your nearest hackerspace. Make sure it's an actual hackerspace though and not just a rebranded co-working space.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  he actually lists that as one of his main bullet points: Old gits like yours truly [were] younger back then.
buildsjets 2y ago
Perhaps this gent needs to buy a Rasperry Pi or an Arduino starter kit and project book. That pretty much checks all his boxes for an inexpensive, technically documented, understandable, hardware-exposed, text-mode, resource-limited, off-line capable computer. It has all the fun hackable qualities of the Apple //e of my youth, except you can buy one for less than $50 instead of the month an a half worth of salary that Dad paid for the //e. $2000 at the time, close to $6000 today, but a worthy investment!
- RhysabOweyn 2y ago
  Another good option is the ESP32. You can get one for less than $10.
  - buildsjets 2y ago
    Yep, I’ve even used the junky ESP32 clones that you can buy for 75 cents on AliExpress, and they usually work fine.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  I think that’s the author’s problem. Anyone can get one and set it up. And I mean that quite literally. I run home assistant on a raspberry pi. I just imaged an SD card and plugged in a few wires. Home Assistant is another good example because you don’t need to know yaml now. There are images for everything that make stuff easy to learn without putting in a lot of hard work. > Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone
- crq-yml 2y ago
  What I've noticed(as someone relatively active around retro hardware communities) is that the users sort into demographics with rather conflicting goals: * I want to run Linux, or CP/M, or a particular version of Basic, or something else with existing software. * I want to recompile existing C code to the new hardware * I want to directly control the hardware with the most minimal kinds of OS layer, and probably using assembly, not C. * The challenges of the hardware are part of my motives for using this platform * I want to work within a certain retro aesthetic and I don't mind adding more hardware or leaning on other people's code to get there So in practice, users tend to arrive in waves according to what developments have happened on that platform previously: neo-retro micro designs released in the past few years like X16, Agon, or Neo6502 first attract people doing the essential hardware bringup tasks. Then they settle in to a cycle of incremental porting and toolchain construction. Gradually the platform becomes understood well enough to do some decent applications. The whole while, everything you wanted to do on the device would be accomplished more readily by using a commodity Linux box, but part of the appeal is in having control over the details. When we use computers to be productive we're usually giving up a lot of the details to software packages and dependencies that are poorly understood by the larger software world and have become the defacto thing everyone uses simply because no equal to them exists. In the time when the retro stuff was actually new, there was a lot of anticipation for those tasks becoming possible someday, but they weren't yet, and that characterized computing as unrealized potential instead of a dull, opaque reality.
jdkee 2y ago
Sub-cultures need gatekeeping. Not for elitism, but to simply keep them alive. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  There are subcultures that are permanently so, and there are subcultures that come out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Home Computing (and the BBS networks, and Usenet, and AOL and Compuserve, et. al.) were a "hobby" that merely mimicked government and corporate use of Big Iron, and they mimicked and updated predecessor social networks, and as such, Home Computing was eventually destined to marry with Big Iron and they met in the middle, penetrating the Consumer Market with devices. It was up to computer hobbyists to refine that consumer appeal. Computer hobbyists could often be men who used computers at work, enjoyed it kinda, or just took their work home with them. My father built a Heathkit component stereo for our home, and it was a full-fledged higher-than-consumer-quality system. While he did not build computers like his son built computers, it was his contact with electronics and gadgets at work that primed him for that ease of use, and his enthusiast's hobbies such as DXing the radio waves. And learning from him, I first learned about computers and electronics at home, and then at school, and I ultimately parlayed it all into a series of jobs in I.T. and Cybersecurity. I was also a member of the Goth subculture. Now there's something that occasionally lends to the mainstream (who doesn't like "Nightmare Before Christmas"?) but mainstream kids won't all go Goth because Goth is just one choice among many, and it's usually rebellious and dark, and there are other kids with other tastes. And Goth culture may appeal more to young adults who may grow out of it. Also, religion can be counter-cultural, or subcultures can form around religious faith and spirituality. And there's plenty of examples. And the plurality of it all means that while Christianity can be mainstream, it's never ubiquitous. Computers and the Internet have the sort of consumer power to make everyone wish that everyone else had them. And so the corporate world will not rest until computers are more ubiquitous and more mainstream than Jesus.
bigyabai 2y ago
> Old gits like yours truly where younger back then. > We were, believe it or not, at the forefront of technology I feel like this passage is deliberately machined to make my proofreading klaxon blare at maximum volume.
o1o1o1 2y ago
> It's simple, but controversial: Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone. There, I said it. Yes, it is controversial for people who do not immediately see what is wrong with it. This is a very efficient way of letting the reader know that the person has problems, without saying so directly. Sure, it is honest, but it reflects very badly on the character, and that is why it is "controversial" (not really, if you have a balanced personality you immediately know that it is just an ego problem). Sorry but I had to stop reading there.
- chneu 2y ago
  This is such a weird victimhood take. Small communities do well because they aren't for everyone. That's how like minded people find each other. That's what subcultures are. By definition they aren't for everyone. You don't have to be offended by everything.
  - o1o1o1 2y ago
    You’re framing this article as harmless nostalgia, but it’s steeped in a particular kind of ideological elitism. The author doesn’t just miss old tech—he explicitly claims “computers were more fun when they weren’t for everyone,” then spends the rest of the piece romanticizing that exclusivity. He presents complexity as a virtue because it filtered people out. That’s not just wistful reflection—it’s gatekeeping framed as culture. His core argument is clear: computing was better when it belonged only to those with the time, skill, or personality to endure its difficulties. That’s not celebrating subculture—it’s lamenting the loss of exclusivity. Calling his stance “elitist” doesn’t excuse it—it just acknowledges it without engaging with what that actually means. Self-awareness isn’t the same as critical reflection, and it doesn’t soften the underlying message: resentment toward accessibility, masked as retro affection. The piece ultimately reads less like love for a bygone era and more like discomfort with the fact that computing has become inclusive. > Old hardware was simpler. This meant that a single person could learn all, or at least most, of its features by heart. Sure - and so is plenty of tech today, if you choose it to be. Simplicity is still available, just not mandatory. No one’s forcing you to turn your home into a smart dystopia or drive a car that needs firmware updates. > Old hardware was limited. Slow processors, low resolutions and cheap sound chips impose restrictions that are fun to overcome with creative problem solving. That kind of constraint is still available - self-imposed, if necessary. Creativity through limitation isn’t gone; it’s just no longer universal. If you miss it, simulate it. Limitations don’t require scarcity. > Old computers were offline. No attention economy, no SaaS subscription models. You could learn a piece of software and keep using it for as long as a decade without experiencing any major overhauls. Great! You can still do that. Turn off Wi-Fi, fire up your legacy tools, and ignore the SaaS world. Nobody is stopping you. > The Internet was mostly text-based. Things were comparably snappy and focused on human-to-human communication rather than passive content consumption and bloated advertising. You can still browse text-only sites with a terminal browser. You can still avoid algorithmic sludge and have meaningful conversations-forums, IRC clones, newsletters, you name it. > Old gits like yours truly where younger back then. We were, believe it or not, at the forefront of technology, instead of struggling to keep up. Exactly. Some of what you’re feeling is just aging-nostalgia reframed as cultural decay. It’s human, but it’s not a critique of the present. > It also meant that if someone had a home computer, chances were that they liked the same stuff as you Communities still exist for people who care deeply - Linux user groups, retro computing forums, hacker conferences. You just have to look past the mainstream. > Left thusly alone, we were free to do whatever the heck we wanted with our mysterious machines. You still are. Boot up your Amiga, fire up a dev board, disconnect from the cloud. The tools are still there. What’s missing is the exclusivity. My final thoughts about the article: This isn’t just longing for a bygone era—it’s discomfort with the present one, especially its inclusivity. That’s what makes the piece not just nostalgic, but ideologically revealing. I honestly feel a bit sorry for the author, who (at least to me) comes across as a disgruntled old guy, romanticizing a time when being seen as a weirdo also meant being seen as a wizard. My final thought about your comment: You say this is a victimhood take, but the real victimhood is in the article - mourning the loss of exclusivity like something was stolen, when really, it was just shared.
lolinder 2y ago
The piece resonated with me a lot—the idea that things were better back before computers became mainstream—right up until they identified the key date where things fell apart as 1995. At that point I had to take a step back and reevaluate the whole thing, because for me the equivalent date was 2014, 20 years later. I missed the very early years of computing, but for me the heyday was the Flash years. I got a copy of Flash and I felt like I could do anything—all the cool games were built by the same tool that I had installed on my computer, and my budding programming skills were like black magic to my friends and family. It was a superpower. Meanwhile, the internet in those days was small and populated mostly by smart and interesting people gathered in small-to-medium sized phpBB servers. The rise of Facebook and smartphones spelled the end of that era, and everything since then has been shallow and hollow by comparison as the internet began catering for the lowest common denominator. That said, now I'm stuck reevaluating my perspective on all that. For this author, my own golden age was after the fall of theirs. I was part of the wave of users who had it too easy—the upstarts who intruded on the good thing they had going. There are two broad explanations I can think of for this: 1. Computing has been declining since the 90s and my golden age was genuinely less good than the author's. 2. Each generation gets cranky and nostalgic with age, and this is just another case of "back in my day". The modern internet feels so genuinely terrible that I can't help but think it must be #1, but #2 is such a common cognitive bias that I can't really dismiss it either.
- chneu 2y ago
  >Meanwhile, the internet in those days was small and populated mostly by smart and interesting people gathered in small-to-medium sized phpBB servers. The hurdle to get online kept a lot of people offline. The hurdle to get online and post is so, so low nowadays that most of the Internet is just garbage. I'm not saying there aren't gems out there. Just that "bad" has gotten more prevalent because creating has become so easy.
- benfortuna 2y ago
  >The modern internet feels so genuinely terrible The enshitification is real, but I would attribute that to being hijacked by advertising platforms. Social media algorithms are literally derived from algorithms for showing relevant ads, and as a result you must be "identified" anywhere you go. Two easy solutions for a better experience: 1. Don't use any sites that use algorithms exclusively (e.g. no Facebook, use Youtube subscriptions rather than the front page, etc.) 2. Don't use sites that require you to login unless there is clear value in doing that (e.g. you can browse Reddit without logging in if you don't intend to comment, etc.)
Jtsummers 2y ago
This could be written about a lot of things and it's still not true. Radios were more fun when people had to buy their own transistors and solder it all together themselves. Cars were more fun when the engine was simple enough to take apart and rebuild with a wrench set and a couple screwdrivers. Oh, wait, you can still do these things. Not with every car or radio out there, but it's still accessible and not even crazy expensive to get into. Computers are still fun even if you're not building it from a kit and can't study the connections across 4500 or so transistors to almost completely understand your microprocessor. And if those are the things that make it fun for, you can still do it. No one is stopping you. Enjoy yourself, stop wishing for a thing that hasn't actually disappeared to come back.
- subjectsigma 2y ago
  It has actually disappeared. The culture the author grew up with is dead and it’s not coming back. He says in the article that he felt both like he was on the forefront of technology and that he had control over it. Now being on the forefront of technology means staring right into existential horrors like AI, global warming, predatory consumerism, and the death of privacy. You can’t just go back to pretending 8-bit computers are new and the future is bright. The author wrote a short piece that was 90% about his feelings; incredible to me how many people in the thread simply ignored that and went right to criticizing technical inaccuracy
- chriswarbo 2y ago
  Indeed, it's a similar lament to how e.g. nobody makes X like in the good old days of Y (for arbitrary X and Y). Except they do, and there's probably way more of X being made, in more nuance of variation, style and fractal sub-categorisation than ever before. What has changed are that people and culture moved on: the people who made X back then are now into some new Z bullshit; the local W, that used to be all about X, is long gone; and V, which was how we followed all the latest X, doesn't even X these days. We can have nostalgia for those things, but we can also find equivalents if we put in some effort: some that stick with the traditional, others that are pushing things in new directions, choose your poison. The Internet has made it easier to find things outside of the mainstream; and may actually be less effort to follow than when it was mainstream (e.g. YouTube channels vs a weekly TV broadcast; blogs vs magazines; discussion forums vs quarterly meetups; etc.). Maybe without a mainstream "direction", the future of X isn't clear; but it also means we can choose which way we want to push that envelope. One thing that does get lost is actually "being mainstream"; e.g. events being huge sell-out affairs; being a topic for casual conversation; etc. Things that require other people to give a shit. Yet that's a two-way street: after all, we don't want those Z idiots trying to push their crap on us!
Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
Maybe this applies to the Internet more than computers. There's still plenty of gatekeeping to go around and you can thank phones and tablets for that. If you're not between the ages of 20 and 40 give or take, then computers must seem plenty mysterious.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Knowing a little bit of computing used to put you far ahead. Now, we have plenty of programmers of all skill ranges, many of whom are really not at all notably useful with computers in any way other than hacking out apps. There's some truth to the idea that computers were more fun when they were opt in things! When they weren't everywhere, when everything didn't depend utterly on them! But I also think that we haven't meaningfully distilled out modern computing power effectively. Few of us are signifcantly more powerful computer enjoyers than we were, and if anything the blackbox mature of apps & the shift of more and more computing away from the Personal Computer to the great Data Keeps in the Cloud, where we have zero ability to touch or see, has demoralized & deinspired & de-potentiated baseline humans from where we were two decades ago. My hope is malleable software workspaces, better general systems where we can see the various ambient digital matter around us & start gluing together scripts & libraries. On the one hand there's good efforts like Node-RED or n8n on open source (which is long term probably a must). But just watching Gemini on the phone follow down the chatbot path, of trying to be a coordinator, able to hook into APIs offered by apps to control & orchestrate them: that integrative function of systems scripting systems has been utterly forsaken for the 30 year interregnum of the Application Uber Alles. Agency has been stagnant at best (waning hard), but we're in various ways starting to look more integratively at computing, and that has to mean more than the black boxes we users have been trapped inside of. Opening the doors of possibility again after so long, having a userodm that can steer themselves & do more & craft things again is exciting as heck. See of course Barefoot developers & home cooked software. Critically, I'd say it is framed in the old mindset of individual isolated bits of software, misses how computing is now compelled again to open its interfaces & let the outsider in via MCP, but it very much is about a re-empowered age of software & computing, an age of more open potential. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 (322 points, 10 months ago, 173 comments)
xnx 2y ago
Computers were fun when single core performance was following Moore's Law. "Single-core performance was improving by 52% per year in 1986–2003 and 23% per year in 2003–2011, but slowed to just seven percent per year in 2011–2018." When you got a new system, everything was noticeably faster. Nothing has been as impressively faster since the SSD. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law The current AI wave definitely captures that same feeling of progress (look at where video generation was 2 years ago), but is also mildly terrifying in a societal way.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  Network speeds are still improving exponentially. There is talk of the Australian National Broadband Network getting an upgrade to either 2.5 Gbps or 10 Gbps! That blows my mind.
  - xnx 2y ago
    That's awesome. Is it possible to notice a difference after 1GBps for home use? Downloading multi-GB weights would be a little faster. Even a 60 fps 8K stream is only measured in MB/s.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      Yes, but it’s not about web page load times, it’s about entirely new usecases being unlocked. Right now I have to keep my 8K raw video footage on a NAS. With 10 Gbps internet, I could keep it on cloud storage and still be able to edit it live. There are many more like this just waiting to be unlocked, especially home robotics with the AI model running in a data. This needs high an uncompressed stereo video feed, which is currently impractical. With 10 Gbps it’s entirely possible.
thefz 2y ago
Back in my teenage years all we could talk about was computers. And games. Nowadays, please let's talk about anything that is not IT, or computers. Or games.
amadeuspagel 2y ago
You were more fun before.
andrewstuart 2y ago
I’m an old nerd and computers today are just as much fun maybe more so than ever. Coding LLMs make creating programs faster and more joyful than slogging through writing every single line of code. I’m just as driven and compelled today as in 1979.
vizzah 2y ago
Yes yes! It all happened too fast. From my ZX, to my first x86, next year 286, end of year 386.. first 10MB hard drive.. and BBS on it.. first downloaded .mp3 from FidoNet .. 486.. Celeron.. Internet.. way way too fast, over the course of 5 years.. 1992-1997 and then it was still phun until about 2002/3 I think =) Then everything went mainstream.
GregDavidson 2y ago
The power languages of the late 1960s and 1970s were awesome! I loved APL, InterLisp, Snobol-3, Smalltalk and SETL. Turtle Graphics with a robot turtle. Writing graphics for the Evans & Sutherland Picture System was awesome. Instead of C or Java we could build anything UCSD Pascal. But look around and you'll find all of these and more available now. Just ignore the blub languages and platforms!
- trod1234 2y ago
  I think you may be conflating the openness of the hardware of the time, with languages.
jpcookie 2y ago
[dead]

57 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

> Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone Or maybe you were just younger? It's not like subcultures don't exist anymore - older people just don't know how to enter them. And it'll happen to us eventually as well. And if we're honest, the democratization of technology was a net positive globally - there have been plenty of negatives like social media but a lot of positives as well like Digital Public Infra.

armada651 2y ago
> Consumerist convenience, walled gardens, corporate risk-adversity and shallow aesthetical homogenization have replaced the sprawling hobbyist collective that once made up the bulk of personal computers and their users. They should definitely go to a Chaos Computer Club event like CCC, because the "sprawling hobbyist collective" is still very much alive. If you want the kind of experience he's waxing lyrical about then go join your nearest hackerspace. Make sure it's an actual hackerspace though and not just a rebranded co-working space.
fsckboy 2y ago
he actually lists that as one of his main bullet points: Old gits like yours truly [were] younger back then.

buildsjets 2y ago

Perhaps this gent needs to buy a Rasperry Pi or an Arduino starter kit and project book. That pretty much checks all his boxes for an inexpensive, technically documented, understandable, hardware-exposed, text-mode, resource-limited, off-line capable computer. It has all the fun hackable qualities of the Apple //e of my youth, except you can buy one for less than $50 instead of the month an a half worth of salary that Dad paid for the //e. $2000 at the time, close to $6000 today, but a worthy investment!

RhysabOweyn 2y ago
Another good option is the ESP32. You can get one for less than $10.
- buildsjets 2y ago
  Yep, I’ve even used the junky ESP32 clones that you can buy for 75 cents on AliExpress, and they usually work fine.
kayodelycaon 2y ago
I think that’s the author’s problem. Anyone can get one and set it up. And I mean that quite literally. I run home assistant on a raspberry pi. I just imaged an SD card and plugged in a few wires. Home Assistant is another good example because you don’t need to know yaml now. There are images for everything that make stuff easy to learn without putting in a lot of hard work. > Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone
crq-yml 2y ago
What I've noticed(as someone relatively active around retro hardware communities) is that the users sort into demographics with rather conflicting goals: * I want to run Linux, or CP/M, or a particular version of Basic, or something else with existing software. * I want to recompile existing C code to the new hardware * I want to directly control the hardware with the most minimal kinds of OS layer, and probably using assembly, not C. * The challenges of the hardware are part of my motives for using this platform * I want to work within a certain retro aesthetic and I don't mind adding more hardware or leaning on other people's code to get there So in practice, users tend to arrive in waves according to what developments have happened on that platform previously: neo-retro micro designs released in the past few years like X16, Agon, or Neo6502 first attract people doing the essential hardware bringup tasks. Then they settle in to a cycle of incremental porting and toolchain construction. Gradually the platform becomes understood well enough to do some decent applications. The whole while, everything you wanted to do on the device would be accomplished more readily by using a commodity Linux box, but part of the appeal is in having control over the details. When we use computers to be productive we're usually giving up a lot of the details to software packages and dependencies that are poorly understood by the larger software world and have become the defacto thing everyone uses simply because no equal to them exists. In the time when the retro stuff was actually new, there was a lot of anticipation for those tasks becoming possible someday, but they weren't yet, and that characterized computing as unrealized potential instead of a dull, opaque reality.

jdkee 2y ago

Sub-cultures need gatekeeping. Not for elitism, but to simply keep them alive. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

AStonesThrow 2y ago
There are subcultures that are permanently so, and there are subcultures that come out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Home Computing (and the BBS networks, and Usenet, and AOL and Compuserve, et. al.) were a "hobby" that merely mimicked government and corporate use of Big Iron, and they mimicked and updated predecessor social networks, and as such, Home Computing was eventually destined to marry with Big Iron and they met in the middle, penetrating the Consumer Market with devices. It was up to computer hobbyists to refine that consumer appeal. Computer hobbyists could often be men who used computers at work, enjoyed it kinda, or just took their work home with them. My father built a Heathkit component stereo for our home, and it was a full-fledged higher-than-consumer-quality system. While he did not build computers like his son built computers, it was his contact with electronics and gadgets at work that primed him for that ease of use, and his enthusiast's hobbies such as DXing the radio waves. And learning from him, I first learned about computers and electronics at home, and then at school, and I ultimately parlayed it all into a series of jobs in I.T. and Cybersecurity. I was also a member of the Goth subculture. Now there's something that occasionally lends to the mainstream (who doesn't like "Nightmare Before Christmas"?) but mainstream kids won't all go Goth because Goth is just one choice among many, and it's usually rebellious and dark, and there are other kids with other tastes. And Goth culture may appeal more to young adults who may grow out of it. Also, religion can be counter-cultural, or subcultures can form around religious faith and spirituality. And there's plenty of examples. And the plurality of it all means that while Christianity can be mainstream, it's never ubiquitous. Computers and the Internet have the sort of consumer power to make everyone wish that everyone else had them. And so the corporate world will not rest until computers are more ubiquitous and more mainstream than Jesus.

bigyabai 2y ago

> Old gits like yours truly where younger back then. > We were, believe it or not, at the forefront of technology I feel like this passage is deliberately machined to make my proofreading klaxon blare at maximum volume.

o1o1o1 2y ago

> It's simple, but controversial: Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone. There, I said it. Yes, it is controversial for people who do not immediately see what is wrong with it. This is a very efficient way of letting the reader know that the person has problems, without saying so directly. Sure, it is honest, but it reflects very badly on the character, and that is why it is "controversial" (not really, if you have a balanced personality you immediately know that it is just an ego problem). Sorry but I had to stop reading there.

chneu 2y ago
This is such a weird victimhood take. Small communities do well because they aren't for everyone. That's how like minded people find each other. That's what subcultures are. By definition they aren't for everyone. You don't have to be offended by everything.
- o1o1o1 2y ago
  You’re framing this article as harmless nostalgia, but it’s steeped in a particular kind of ideological elitism. The author doesn’t just miss old tech—he explicitly claims “computers were more fun when they weren’t for everyone,” then spends the rest of the piece romanticizing that exclusivity. He presents complexity as a virtue because it filtered people out. That’s not just wistful reflection—it’s gatekeeping framed as culture. His core argument is clear: computing was better when it belonged only to those with the time, skill, or personality to endure its difficulties. That’s not celebrating subculture—it’s lamenting the loss of exclusivity. Calling his stance “elitist” doesn’t excuse it—it just acknowledges it without engaging with what that actually means. Self-awareness isn’t the same as critical reflection, and it doesn’t soften the underlying message: resentment toward accessibility, masked as retro affection. The piece ultimately reads less like love for a bygone era and more like discomfort with the fact that computing has become inclusive. > Old hardware was simpler. This meant that a single person could learn all, or at least most, of its features by heart. Sure - and so is plenty of tech today, if you choose it to be. Simplicity is still available, just not mandatory. No one’s forcing you to turn your home into a smart dystopia or drive a car that needs firmware updates. > Old hardware was limited. Slow processors, low resolutions and cheap sound chips impose restrictions that are fun to overcome with creative problem solving. That kind of constraint is still available - self-imposed, if necessary. Creativity through limitation isn’t gone; it’s just no longer universal. If you miss it, simulate it. Limitations don’t require scarcity. > Old computers were offline. No attention economy, no SaaS subscription models. You could learn a piece of software and keep using it for as long as a decade without experiencing any major overhauls. Great! You can still do that. Turn off Wi-Fi, fire up your legacy tools, and ignore the SaaS world. Nobody is stopping you. > The Internet was mostly text-based. Things were comparably snappy and focused on human-to-human communication rather than passive content consumption and bloated advertising. You can still browse text-only sites with a terminal browser. You can still avoid algorithmic sludge and have meaningful conversations-forums, IRC clones, newsletters, you name it. > Old gits like yours truly where younger back then. We were, believe it or not, at the forefront of technology, instead of struggling to keep up. Exactly. Some of what you’re feeling is just aging-nostalgia reframed as cultural decay. It’s human, but it’s not a critique of the present. > It also meant that if someone had a home computer, chances were that they liked the same stuff as you Communities still exist for people who care deeply - Linux user groups, retro computing forums, hacker conferences. You just have to look past the mainstream. > Left thusly alone, we were free to do whatever the heck we wanted with our mysterious machines. You still are. Boot up your Amiga, fire up a dev board, disconnect from the cloud. The tools are still there. What’s missing is the exclusivity. My final thoughts about the article: This isn’t just longing for a bygone era—it’s discomfort with the present one, especially its inclusivity. That’s what makes the piece not just nostalgic, but ideologically revealing. I honestly feel a bit sorry for the author, who (at least to me) comes across as a disgruntled old guy, romanticizing a time when being seen as a weirdo also meant being seen as a wizard. My final thought about your comment: You say this is a victimhood take, but the real victimhood is in the article - mourning the loss of exclusivity like something was stolen, when really, it was just shared.

lolinder 2y ago

The piece resonated with me a lot—the idea that things were better back before computers became mainstream—right up until they identified the key date where things fell apart as 1995. At that point I had to take a step back and reevaluate the whole thing, because for me the equivalent date was 2014, 20 years later. I missed the very early years of computing, but for me the heyday was the Flash years. I got a copy of Flash and I felt like I could do anything—all the cool games were built by the same tool that I had installed on my computer, and my budding programming skills were like black magic to my friends and family. It was a superpower. Meanwhile, the internet in those days was small and populated mostly by smart and interesting people gathered in small-to-medium sized phpBB servers. The rise of Facebook and smartphones spelled the end of that era, and everything since then has been shallow and hollow by comparison as the internet began catering for the lowest common denominator. That said, now I'm stuck reevaluating my perspective on all that. For this author, my own golden age was after the fall of theirs. I was part of the wave of users who had it too easy—the upstarts who intruded on the good thing they had going. There are two broad explanations I can think of for this: 1. Computing has been declining since the 90s and my golden age was genuinely less good than the author's. 2. Each generation gets cranky and nostalgic with age, and this is just another case of "back in my day". The modern internet feels so genuinely terrible that I can't help but think it must be #1, but #2 is such a common cognitive bias that I can't really dismiss it either.

chneu 2y ago
>Meanwhile, the internet in those days was small and populated mostly by smart and interesting people gathered in small-to-medium sized phpBB servers. The hurdle to get online kept a lot of people offline. The hurdle to get online and post is so, so low nowadays that most of the Internet is just garbage. I'm not saying there aren't gems out there. Just that "bad" has gotten more prevalent because creating has become so easy.
benfortuna 2y ago
>The modern internet feels so genuinely terrible The enshitification is real, but I would attribute that to being hijacked by advertising platforms. Social media algorithms are literally derived from algorithms for showing relevant ads, and as a result you must be "identified" anywhere you go. Two easy solutions for a better experience: 1. Don't use any sites that use algorithms exclusively (e.g. no Facebook, use Youtube subscriptions rather than the front page, etc.) 2. Don't use sites that require you to login unless there is clear value in doing that (e.g. you can browse Reddit without logging in if you don't intend to comment, etc.)

Jtsummers 2y ago

This could be written about a lot of things and it's still not true. Radios were more fun when people had to buy their own transistors and solder it all together themselves. Cars were more fun when the engine was simple enough to take apart and rebuild with a wrench set and a couple screwdrivers. Oh, wait, you can still do these things. Not with every car or radio out there, but it's still accessible and not even crazy expensive to get into. Computers are still fun even if you're not building it from a kit and can't study the connections across 4500 or so transistors to almost completely understand your microprocessor. And if those are the things that make it fun for, you can still do it. No one is stopping you. Enjoy yourself, stop wishing for a thing that hasn't actually disappeared to come back.

subjectsigma 2y ago
It has actually disappeared. The culture the author grew up with is dead and it’s not coming back. He says in the article that he felt both like he was on the forefront of technology and that he had control over it. Now being on the forefront of technology means staring right into existential horrors like AI, global warming, predatory consumerism, and the death of privacy. You can’t just go back to pretending 8-bit computers are new and the future is bright. The author wrote a short piece that was 90% about his feelings; incredible to me how many people in the thread simply ignored that and went right to criticizing technical inaccuracy
chriswarbo 2y ago
Indeed, it's a similar lament to how e.g. nobody makes X like in the good old days of Y (for arbitrary X and Y). Except they do, and there's probably way more of X being made, in more nuance of variation, style and fractal sub-categorisation than ever before. What has changed are that people and culture moved on: the people who made X back then are now into some new Z bullshit; the local W, that used to be all about X, is long gone; and V, which was how we followed all the latest X, doesn't even X these days. We can have nostalgia for those things, but we can also find equivalents if we put in some effort: some that stick with the traditional, others that are pushing things in new directions, choose your poison. The Internet has made it easier to find things outside of the mainstream; and may actually be less effort to follow than when it was mainstream (e.g. YouTube channels vs a weekly TV broadcast; blogs vs magazines; discussion forums vs quarterly meetups; etc.). Maybe without a mainstream "direction", the future of X isn't clear; but it also means we can choose which way we want to push that envelope. One thing that does get lost is actually "being mainstream"; e.g. events being huge sell-out affairs; being a topic for casual conversation; etc. Things that require other people to give a shit. Yet that's a two-way street: after all, we don't want those Z idiots trying to push their crap on us!

Acrobatic_Road 2y ago

Maybe this applies to the Internet more than computers. There's still plenty of gatekeeping to go around and you can thank phones and tablets for that. If you're not between the ages of 20 and 40 give or take, then computers must seem plenty mysterious.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Knowing a little bit of computing used to put you far ahead. Now, we have plenty of programmers of all skill ranges, many of whom are really not at all notably useful with computers in any way other than hacking out apps. There's some truth to the idea that computers were more fun when they were opt in things! When they weren't everywhere, when everything didn't depend utterly on them! But I also think that we haven't meaningfully distilled out modern computing power effectively. Few of us are signifcantly more powerful computer enjoyers than we were, and if anything the blackbox mature of apps & the shift of more and more computing away from the Personal Computer to the great Data Keeps in the Cloud, where we have zero ability to touch or see, has demoralized & deinspired & de-potentiated baseline humans from where we were two decades ago. My hope is malleable software workspaces, better general systems where we can see the various ambient digital matter around us & start gluing together scripts & libraries. On the one hand there's good efforts like Node-RED or n8n on open source (which is long term probably a must). But just watching Gemini on the phone follow down the chatbot path, of trying to be a coordinator, able to hook into APIs offered by apps to control & orchestrate them: that integrative function of systems scripting systems has been utterly forsaken for the 30 year interregnum of the Application Uber Alles. Agency has been stagnant at best (waning hard), but we're in various ways starting to look more integratively at computing, and that has to mean more than the black boxes we users have been trapped inside of. Opening the doors of possibility again after so long, having a userodm that can steer themselves & do more & craft things again is exciting as heck. See of course Barefoot developers & home cooked software. Critically, I'd say it is framed in the old mindset of individual isolated bits of software, misses how computing is now compelled again to open its interfaces & let the outsider in via MCP, but it very much is about a re-empowered age of software & computing, an age of more open potential. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 (322 points, 10 months ago, 173 comments)

xnx 2y ago

Computers were fun when single core performance was following Moore's Law. "Single-core performance was improving by 52% per year in 1986–2003 and 23% per year in 2003–2011, but slowed to just seven percent per year in 2011–2018." When you got a new system, everything was noticeably faster. Nothing has been as impressively faster since the SSD. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law The current AI wave definitely captures that same feeling of progress (look at where video generation was 2 years ago), but is also mildly terrifying in a societal way.

jiggawatts 2y ago
Network speeds are still improving exponentially. There is talk of the Australian National Broadband Network getting an upgrade to either 2.5 Gbps or 10 Gbps! That blows my mind.
- xnx 2y ago
  That's awesome. Is it possible to notice a difference after 1GBps for home use? Downloading multi-GB weights would be a little faster. Even a 60 fps 8K stream is only measured in MB/s.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    Yes, but it’s not about web page load times, it’s about entirely new usecases being unlocked. Right now I have to keep my 8K raw video footage on a NAS. With 10 Gbps internet, I could keep it on cloud storage and still be able to edit it live. There are many more like this just waiting to be unlocked, especially home robotics with the AI model running in a data. This needs high an uncompressed stereo video feed, which is currently impractical. With 10 Gbps it’s entirely possible.

thefz 2y ago

Back in my teenage years all we could talk about was computers. And games. Nowadays, please let's talk about anything that is not IT, or computers. Or games.

amadeuspagel 2y ago

You were more fun before.

andrewstuart 2y ago

I’m an old nerd and computers today are just as much fun maybe more so than ever. Coding LLMs make creating programs faster and more joyful than slogging through writing every single line of code. I’m just as driven and compelled today as in 1979.

vizzah 2y ago

Yes yes! It all happened too fast. From my ZX, to my first x86, next year 286, end of year 386.. first 10MB hard drive.. and BBS on it.. first downloaded .mp3 from FidoNet .. 486.. Celeron.. Internet.. way way too fast, over the course of 5 years.. 1992-1997 and then it was still phun until about 2002/3 I think =) Then everything went mainstream.

GregDavidson 2y ago

The power languages of the late 1960s and 1970s were awesome! I loved APL, InterLisp, Snobol-3, Smalltalk and SETL. Turtle Graphics with a robot turtle. Writing graphics for the Evans & Sutherland Picture System was awesome. Instead of C or Java we could build anything UCSD Pascal. But look around and you'll find all of these and more available now. Just ignore the blub languages and platforms!

trod1234 2y ago
I think you may be conflating the openness of the hardware of the time, with languages.

jpcookie 2y ago

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