The tech has evolved a lot. Especially in the FOSS area! And I am thankful for the progress. But along the way, the average culture is what I miss the most. Do I miss the very convoluted, fragile, non-standardized, and hard to configure hardware? Heehee naw.
This image is nostalgic because it recalls when personal computers were conceptually personal, even when they were public. New tech was fun and exciting.
Some of my fondest memories were easy LAN parties and collabing on XP-era machines in my 3D Studio MAX class. Also, computers didn’t feel near-useless without an Internet connection.
It’s been said before but bears repeating: “The Internet was a place.” It didn’t follow you everywhere, spy on you, sell you out. You weren’t supposed to divulge your whole life to strangers, but somehow you still made new friends.
People logged in to hang out. Heck, know what I miss most? People seemed to have TIME to log in and hang out. Even busy people. These days I feel hurried to smash out a text message while in motion.
People made personal, expressive, whimsical websites for fun, and not just as a hopeful web-dev portfolio. The Internet was only about making money for tie-wearing squares; everyone else just did things for the fun of it.
I think that’s what we miss. People were learning and using these miraculous machines that were capable of anything.
Now the machines are consumption-first appliances primarily aimed to drain your wallet and personal information, and the people have gotten so dumb. Computer literacy dropped with all the rest of kinds of literacy, and I long to find a way to push against that tide…
Well no, I hated computer class, but I fucking hate modern computers, the modern Internet and AI more.
Rick Rosner had this to say about high school:
High school’s attractive to me, not necessarily because you have a good time, but because it’s clear why you are miserable.
I would go for a redo if I could. I would know better not to trust the guidance councilors or school therapists. No compromises on the classes I really should have been in.
No.
Yes. Websites were dead easy to make. I could fit all my music onto one floppy disk because I saved them as midis. There were no standards for sound or graphics cards so everything played different on different computers. You could access information without needing to sign up because emails were just emerging. You could get an email address with a name you wanted. Adobe hadn’t bought Macromedia yet. Autodesk hadn’t bought 3ds max yet. Animated gifs. Flying toaster screensavers. In fact, the screensavers had sound! Would give you a great attack if you left your speakers on.
What I miss a lot more than the hardware was the straightforwardness of coding. In those days we largely just translated process logic into code, we didn’t have to cobble together frameworks, packages, libraries and containers. The code itself took more work but we could do it without knowing as much as devs have to know now.
No
I miss the community of it. As with a lot of things having it at home seems easier and better but so much more lonely.
I can smell this picture
Yes, comprehensible systems? Just enough to be very exciting? Positive energy? My youth? The music?
Uh, yes?
all of those things were beautiful. all long gone now.
Yeah, but I’m glad we’re not burning electricity on those anymore. Screensavers were fun at the time, but putting the displays to sleep is the better practice.
I miss most of all when the internet was the domain of nerds only. Us nerds are nicer than other people on average.
The Internet was for anybody. I think it was a mistake to foist it on everybody.
Or when “bad”, a hell of a lot more entertaining, like Archimedes Plutonium for example.
deleted by creator
Playing Unreal Tournament and Duke Nuken 3D with everyone else in the lab.
Yes. Although, more than the technology or the culture, I probably miss being a kid with a bright future ahead of him…
No
