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Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?

#12

Post by Isamu »

About 1980, in the main terminal room in Wean Hall at CMU, late night but the place is packed because so many have assignments due the next day.

The DEC-20 is under heavy load, all the DECscope VT52's are occupied, as well as the less desirable DECwriter III terminals with fan-fold paper.

Many of the DECscopes are running TECO EMACS sessions, I see some people writing papers in Scribe (Brian Reid's word processing language.)

Suddenly everything stops in the room and everyone holds their breath for a couple very long seconds.

"%DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING" prints on every terminal in unison. Everybody cries out in anguish.

Good times.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?

#13

Post by pattrn »

2002: Devised without a book what I later discovered was the MinMax algorithm (my father was quite unhappy when he discovered tic-tac-toe game trees penciled on the side of the staircase) and wrote a really terrible chess engine with it. That sparked a lifelong interest in programming. A couple years later, I had a blast implementing AlphaBeta (w/pruning), NegaScout, MTDf. Eventually got into NNs, which I used for leaf-node scoring, and made a bot that played on ICC (Internet Chess Club) that became a recurring opponent for an IM at the time. The IM would chat with the bot, since he was convinced by its play-style that it was human. In college, turned the leaf-node NN into an FPGA to speed up the calculations by parallelizing them.

Then I got a 9-5 job and my dreams of working in AI faded into the ether. Life comes at you fast.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?

#15

Post by api_or_ipa »

oldmancoyote wrote: post #10

I began programming in 1968. 50 years later I can't think of anything I'm nostalgic about. There were some OK to Good times, but nothing stands out. I'd rather have done something else. I do recall first reading Tog's edition of Macintosh User Interface Guidelines as opening up my perspective. For lack of anything else I'd choose it.

I'm curious to hear about your 50 year career spanning some of the most important revolutions in computer history. What do you work on now, and how does it compare to what you worked on it 1968? How did people such as yourself get into computing in 1968? What was the availability of computers and what rules dictated human participation with computers? What improvement was the biggest leap forward? Where there any 'winters' you felt where innovation became dormant, stagnated or even declined?

Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?

#16

Post by exikyut »

pattrn wrote: post #13

2002: Devised without a book what I later discovered was the MinMax algorithm (my father was quite unhappy when he discovered tic-tac-toe game trees penciled on the side of the staircase) and wrote a really terrible chess engine with it. That sparked a lifelong interest in programming. A couple years later, I had a blast implementing AlphaBeta (w/pruning), NegaScout, MTDf. Eventually got into NNs, which I used for le…

Do you still have any of this stuff sitting around? Particularly the FPGA part.

If you do, I would love to see videos of this in action (not code). Would be absolutely awesome. Seriously! I don't care that it's from 2002, that's what makes me more interested if anything.

Also... people are Very Interested™ in neural networking now. I am 100.0% sure that if you threw this info at a few companies they wouldn't mind waiting a little while for you to shift gears (switch jobs) and catch up to the way things are done now (train, at expense, for a few months). You'd likely take a bit less time than the next person, in any case.

Yes, this would certainly be a major undertaking and not something to be rushed, but I don't think your interviewers would be disinterestedly waiting for whoever they're seeing next, to put it one way...

One thing. I'd recommend a position where you step back and look at the bigger picture rather than drown in implementational/technical details all day - you're clearly already figuring things out for yourself, so bogging yourself down with the ways others are doing everything would be noise you could do without.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?

#18

Post by drakonka »

From oldest to newest:

* In Ukraine sometime in the 90s we had no computer, but the local arcade did. Sometimes my parents would give us "kapeyki" (basically like pennies) and my sister and I would gather then up and then run to the arcade across the street to stand in line to play The Lion King. We were obsessed with both the Disney film and the game. As soon as you died you lost your spot and the wait back in line could be an hour sometimes. I kept dying on the giraffes.

* Later we had a short-lived computer course at School Number 11. We had to come in outside of normal school days (which were Mon-Sat) to participate. I was too young to remember the specifics, but we had to type in programs to play some car racing game. I was really fast at it and always got to play the finished product first - unfortunately the course was short lived.

* When we got our first computer after moving to Alabama and got AOL dial-up I realized "Holy crap you can make things." My mom thought it was a passing phase, but she dutifully went the library with me to check out stacks of books on HTML, CSS, and PHP and brought back video game CDs she spotted at her trips to random stores. One of those games was Creatures 3 and it was what got me interested in life simulations to this day.

* Later I got to work with one of the guys who helped make The Lion King

Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?

#19

Post by mbrock »

My early teens around when I first got a copy of GNU/Linux. Someone in a local IRC channel sold me a CD with Slackware 6 for a couple of bucks. That launched me into an intensive period of learning.

In these youthful days, when I didn't have to earn a living and school ended at 3 PM, learning stuff about hacking computers was pure in some sense, maybe because it was purely self-directed out of curiosity.

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