I wouldn't calling it learning more and more like "cycling through SoundBlaster DMA and IRQ options until the sound work". Still, there was an intrinsic curiosity that isn't as prevalent.
We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
31–40 of 283 posts
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#32It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated c…
The financialization of everything is what's ruining everything. In the computer and internet realm, there's warm nostalgia from hours spent tinkering, building one's own PC, reformatting C drives due to malware, searching for "snippets" to add a forum or pimp a myspace page. But inevitably the money incentives come to dominate. It's all of our doing, we all dream of a better life to put it charitably.
Now everything is a means to a commercial end. Tinkering for fun and knowledge just isn't profitable. And it matters less and less what each our stance is on money and capital if the people that optimize for money and capital gobble up all the money and capital. Of all that's going on, the wealth gap is what's most troubling to me, closely followed because it's closely related is "post truth". I think post-truth is roughly caused by the fact that people are happy to believe what they want to believe toward some commercialized and/or idealogical end. You're much more likely to hate and blame your neighbor when you look around and you're the one not doing too well.
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#33I worry less about whether people know how it all works.
I worry more about whether people care and consider it a problem when nobody knows.
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#34"To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked. So you learned. You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them." Ehh I dunno about that. I rarely, if ever, had to mess with any of that junk after Windows 3... I also didn't have to deal with any IRQ issues. So seems like it was already mostly abstracted in the "1990s" lol
Yeah same. I remember playing a bunch of Sierra games on my first PC as a kid on either. Most I had to deal with was installing the drivers for my SoundBlaster card from the included disk. Most I dealt with was putting in the CD, double clicking the installer and entering the product key.
That said I did run into my fair share of other problems, and that early era of personal computing and my access to machines is the only reason I work in computing/tech today. If my childhood wasn't full of tinkering with these fascinating machines, and I only ever had an iPhone or iPad, I likely would have turned out much different.
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#35It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated c…
> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile. We could do this forever.
the difference is that an automatic transmission doesn't make the car work worse. The modern UX landscape would rather board up a room because the door has a sharp handle than figure out how to make the handle less sharp
ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#36It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated c…
> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile. We could do this forever.
Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.
I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.
Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#37There was a sweet spot with computer technologies for some decades where hobbyists could afford to experiment and even push the envelope in the nascent field of computing - similar to genetic radiation, many niches were formed and rapidly filled. The computing biome has evolved to the point where most entities are not operating at the low-level abstractions that were once the only means of interacting with the comput…
This is definitely true, and we definitely need something similar again. I've been using a game ("The Farmer Was Replaced") as a jumping-off point for teaching the kids Python, but the more I think about it, the more I think that they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. It was easy, back in the day, to learn a ton (even assembler) on a sy…
Zach Barth and his former studio Zachtronics released several entertaining puzzle games based on idealized fake assembly languages. These are a lot of fun and useful for introducing registers and multiprocessing.
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#38"To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked. So you learned. You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them." Ehh I dunno about that. I rarely, if ever, had to mess with any of that junk after Windows 3... I also didn't have to deal with any IRQ issues. So seems like it was already mostly abstracted in the "1990s" lol
Anecdotally, I think it depends on age and family more than anything. I grew up with hand-me-down computers, games because we couldn't afford anything new. Started with win98 and games from the mid 90s, but running them in 2002.
I do remember having to look lots of things up and figuring out why some things wouldnt work. Then getting into building our own computers (because it was cheaper) and figuring out how to get halflife mods working...
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#39"To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked. So you learned. You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them." Ehh I dunno about that. I rarely, if ever, had to mess with any of that junk after Windows 3... I also didn't have to deal with any IRQ issues. So seems like it was already mostly abstracted in the "1990s" lol
Windows 3.x did not cohabitate well with certain games that required nearly the entire 640k of conventional memory to run. These are mainly games from the old DOS days; games that relied on DPMI were largely exempt. But to play certain Sierra titles, for instance, you had to set up one CONFIG.SYS configuration that loaded HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE for Windows and another that left them out to free up that memory for your games. In later versions of DOS you could set up a menu to select the appropriate configuration at boot.
And of course IRQ diddling was still necessary to configure sound, network, and game controller hardware throughout the DOS era of gaming, which lasted well into the Windows 9x era.
Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
#40Who cares? There have always been layers of abstraction. I've been around for a while, and when I was a kid, the two choices I remember seeing were assembly code and simple semantic languages like BASIC. Assembly seemed like too cryptic for me to really even follow and I never really did learn it, but at the time I remember people would say that assembly was easy and basically plain English compared to machine code.…
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