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Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

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Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#31

Post by queenkjuul »

lolinder wrote: post #11

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…

I got a hand me down copy of Flash 5 around 2003 and i absolutely adored it. Didn't actually learn much programming (i was 9 years old) but the ease of animation and wiring up buttons was absolutely enchanting.

Personally, though, i don't really have a golden age. I love retro computing, it's how I spend a terrible amount of my time, and most of it i spend thinking, "thank god we don't live like this anymore" lmao.

The Internet specifically, though, was more fun in the pre-Facebook/Twitter/Instagram world, absolutely no question there.

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#32

Post by queenkjuul »

lubujackson wrote: post #30
lolinder wrote: post #11

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…

We remember the good and forget the negatives. Like waiting 5 minutes for a 500k image to load, trying to configure jumpers on a sound card, or waiting multiple minutes to load a game (or the next level in a game...) The joys of today are just different from when I was a kid. I can bemoan that games can't truly have secrets and lore any more, which is true. But my son can craft an entire world in Minecraft and have h…

My most distinct memories of Photoshop in the 2000s are of it crashing my entire system and trashing two hours of work. I don't even want to think what IDEs were like to work with in the 90s

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#33

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

lubujackson wrote: post #30
lolinder wrote: post #11

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…

We remember the good and forget the negatives. Like waiting 5 minutes for a 500k image to load, trying to configure jumpers on a sound card, or waiting multiple minutes to load a game (or the next level in a game...) The joys of today are just different from when I was a kid. I can bemoan that games can't truly have secrets and lore any more, which is true. But my son can craft an entire world in Minecraft and have h…

There was nothing wrong with configuring jumpers on (sound)cards, if you knew what you did, and why other stuff was jumpered which way. In fact it was more reliable before 'plug & pray' turned into a working thing with PCI and good modern BIOS(for that time).

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#34

Post by subjectsigma »

o1o1o1 wrote: post #28
subjectsigma wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes me wish some people were still being filtered by the difficulty of TCP/IP

Wow, I am surprised how many of you there are, I feel really sorry for you and hope that one day you will find the happiness in your life that you seem to have lost.

Same to you. Writing a 300 word rant about a stranger’s lukewarm opinion, revealing the massive chip in your own shoulder while simultaneously diagnosing others with “ego problems” is not normal!

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#35

Post by olyjohn »

lubujackson wrote: post #30
lolinder wrote: post #11

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…

We remember the good and forget the negatives. Like waiting 5 minutes for a 500k image to load, trying to configure jumpers on a sound card, or waiting multiple minutes to load a game (or the next level in a game...) The joys of today are just different from when I was a kid. I can bemoan that games can't truly have secrets and lore any more, which is true. But my son can craft an entire world in Minecraft and have h…

I mean, that's fun that your kids can play Minecraft and build in it. But does that teach them anything about technology?

Half the fun of having a computer back in the day was digging through the filesystem, mucking with settings and breaking things... looking at what was on floppy disks and CDROMs (I found Weezer's music video and a Pinball game on the Windows 95 CDROM, it was thrilling). You learned how the computers worked, and that was powerful. It enabled you to do so much more than just play games. You could view source, and suddenly you were a web developer. You could hit up Warez sites and get access to all the professional software that you couldn't afford.

10 year old me now, would have ended up playing with my parents smartphone, then getting sucked into endless feeds of shit, and actually learning nothing. I might have given up. There's no curiosity on the dominant computing platforms because you can't do what you want with them, you can only do what you're allowed to do. A pocket computer could be so powerful, and indeed they do a lot, but they could be so much more than a conduit for middlemen to take your money.

Yes I know that ESP32s and Pis and lots of cool experimental things exist. And they are cool. But the initial experience of using a computer back in the day was what sparked my interest. Locked down iPhones and Android tablets let you run Apps. What a discouraging experience that must be.

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#36

Post by vizzah »

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.

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#37

Post by jiggawatts »

xnx wrote: post #21

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 The current AI wave definit…

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.

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#38

Post by xnx »

jiggawatts wrote: post #37
xnx wrote: post #21

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 The current AI wave definit…

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.

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.

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#39

Post by jiggawatts »

xnx wrote: post #38
jiggawatts wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

#40

Post by GregDavidson »

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!
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