80s: getting to run IBM mainframes by myself
90s: getting my first Sparcstation on my desk
Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#22About 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 la…
and today we just yell at CMU-SECURE
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#23I was in the Systems Lab at UTSA in 1979 when a professor came in with a tape and said that he got it from Bell Labs with a thing called Unix. We had studied about Multics and the word play wasn't quite obvious to me them. In any case, we did not have a PDP-11 to read it on; the lab had a Data General Nova. My attention was devoted to my project and I did not have time to waste on frivolous things like the newfangled OS from Bell Labs.
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#2490's - I was coding a Turbo Pascal assignment in my brand new Pentium 66Mhz. Previous computer was an 286 @12.5Mhz. You could really feel the difference in speed compiling... and debugging.
I remember not beign able to spot a bug because the machine was so fast. Inside a loop I mistyped extra zero in the counter: Instead of 1000 iterations it did 10000.
After those 9000 extra iterations the program output was wrong and I didn't knew why.
In the Pentium you couldn't tell the difference in speed because the output came instantly... but in the i286 the difference in speed was so big you could tell you iterated too much.
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#2590's - I went to the computer room in college and found a friend copying stuff to a lot of floppy discs.
Turns out he was downloading linux for the fist time...
I grabbed another computer and help him download copy the stuff. We could not download the floppies in parallel because the university had a shared 64kbps connection to the Internet.
4 hours and 100 floppy discs later he when home and installed Linux for the first time and opened my first linux account outside the university lab.
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#26It started in the 80s when a friend brought me into a department store to type quickly into a computer "10 PRINT 'HELLO'; 20 GOTO 10" and then he pressed return. Magic! I was hooked from that moment on forward.
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#27using 20+ floppies to install windows 95 only to get up "windows protection error", like a zillion time, and trying again in hopes it ll work the next time?
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#2880's the day my grandparents bought me an Amiga.
90's Scraping every penny I could get to buy a NeXT box so I could download the WorldWideWeb browser and editor so I could check out this new thing Tim Lee had created called the web. Got the money, got a NeXT box, built a page and decided that I wanted to get out of the desktop app development business that day. After the CGI spec I knew I was going to be able to.
A good follow up to this conversation would be what are your biggest technical disappointments by decade:
80's would have been LISP machines not catching on.
90's downfall of Commodore, Apple's handling of Copeland and the purchase of CosmoWorld's by Computer Associates (that might have been early 00's).
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#2980’s: Coleco Adam. Cassette tapes, Buck Rogers, and programming for the first time in BASIC. It died when I was about 10 years old.
90’s: 486, 28.8 modem which I spent a small fortune on (for a teenager). Programming in C++ and Assembly. Getting a CD-ROM drive for Xmas and installing it. Getting a book on Linux and installing Slackware from the included CD. Finished high school and within a year I began my now 22+ year career as a programmer and it has taken me around the world.
Re: Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
#30Winter Games, on a 486, when I somehow managed to edit the high-scores with a hex editor and put my name on top. I started programming the next day and haven't stopped since.