Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

>Meanwhile, the internet in those days was small and populated mostly by smart and interesting people gathered in small-to-medium sized phpBB servers.

The hurdle to get online kept a lot of people offline.

The hurdle to get online and post is so, so low nowadays that most of the Internet is just garbage.

I'm not saying there aren't gems out there. Just that "bad" has gotten more prevalent because creating has become so easy.

This is such a weird victimhood take.

Small communities do well because they aren't for everyone. That's how like minded people find each other. That's what subcultures are. By definition they aren't for everyone.

You don't have to be offended by everything.

Maybe this applies to the Internet more than computers. There's still plenty of gatekeeping to go around and you can thank phones and tablets for that. If you're not between the ages of 20 and 40 give or take, then computers must seem plenty mysterious.

Knowing a little bit of computing used to put you far ahead.

Now, we have plenty of programmers of all skill ranges, many of whom are really not at all notably useful with computers in any way other than hacking out apps.

There's some truth to the idea that computers were more fun when they were opt in things! When they weren't everywhere, when everything didn't depend utterly on them!

But I also think that we haven't meaningfully distilled out modern computing power effectively. Few of us are signifcantly more powerful computer enjoyers than we were, and if anything the blackbox mature of apps & the shift of more and more computing away from the Personal Computer to the great Data Keeps in the Cloud, where we have zero ability to touch or see, has demoralized & deinspired & de-potentiated baseline humans from where we were two decades ago.

My hope is malleable software workspaces, better general systems where we can see the various ambient digital matter around us & start gluing together scripts & libraries. On the one hand there's good efforts like Node-RED or n8n on open source (which is long term probably a must). But just watching Gemini on the phone follow down the chatbot path, of trying to be a coordinator, able to hook into APIs offered by apps to control & orchestrate them: that integrative function of systems scripting systems has been utterly forsaken for the 30 year interregnum of the Application Uber Alles. Agency has been stagnant at best (waning hard), but we're in various ways starting to look more integratively at computing, and that has to mean more than the black boxes we users have been trapped inside of. Opening the doors of possibility again after so long, having a userodm that can steer themselves & do more & craft things again is exciting as heck.

See of course Barefoot developers & home cooked software. Critically, I'd say it is framed in the old mindset of individual isolated bits of software, misses how computing is now compelled again to open its interfaces & let the outsider in via MCP, but it very much is about a re-empowered age of software & computing, an age of more open potential. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 (322 points, 10 months ago, 173 comments)

There are subcultures that are permanently so, and there are subcultures that come out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Home Computing (and the BBS networks, and Usenet, and AOL and Compuserve, et. al.) were a "hobby" that merely mimicked government and corporate use of Big Iron, and they mimicked and updated predecessor social networks, and as such, Home Computing was eventually destined to marry with Big Iron and they met in the middle, penetrating the Consumer Market with devices.

It was up to computer hobbyists to refine that consumer appeal. Computer hobbyists could often be men who used computers at work, enjoyed it kinda, or just took their work home with them. My father built a Heathkit component stereo for our home, and it was a full-fledged higher-than-consumer-quality system. While he did not build computers like his son built computers, it was his contact with electronics and gadgets at work that primed him for that ease of use, and his enthusiast's hobbies such as DXing the radio waves. And learning from him, I first learned about computers and electronics at home, and then at school, and I ultimately parlayed it all into a series of jobs in I.T. and Cybersecurity.

I was also a member of the Goth subculture. Now there's something that occasionally lends to the mainstream (who doesn't like "Nightmare Before Christmas"?) but mainstream kids won't all go Goth because Goth is just one choice among many, and it's usually rebellious and dark, and there are other kids with other tastes. And Goth culture may appeal more to young adults who may grow out of it.

Also, religion can be counter-cultural, or subcultures can form around religious faith and spirituality. And there's plenty of examples. And the plurality of it all means that while Christianity can be mainstream, it's never ubiquitous. Computers and the Internet have the sort of consumer power to make everyone wish that everyone else had them. And so the corporate world will not rest until computers are more ubiquitous and more mainstream than Jesus.