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Comment by hertzdog | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for your post and thanks for all the comments... it takes me years back. Maybe a dumb question: why we all miss those days? I don't think it is only related to being young. I am convinced it is something related to a "less noise/new tools" and probably I agree about "the more constraints more creativity". Is there anybody who can better articulate or have a different vision?

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About missing those days - I still find joy in doing a lot of the same things around software, and although I did sell Dementia for $50/copy, it was a passion project and not a job.

If I was retired and didn't need to work, I'd still find some software to build and spend my time building it because that's something that I love to do. That's essentially what we were doing back then, so it was a good time.

I think there is some truth to what you're getting at with less noise and constraints and creativity.

Although - during this time, I dreamed of a future when every house and every business had their own BBS. That basically happened in the form of the www. The www and internet would have AMAZED a teenage me, it still does.

I remember that past fondly because they were exciting times for those reasons, but current times are also exciting. :)

The internet got popular. What that means: Government snooping, DMCA, lots of non-nerds and idiots on the internet, websites that lock content down regionally, bloated garbage websites.

There was lots of untapped potential back then which made things exciting. Also, the communities were smaller, like families.

I wasn't part of the scene (too young), but from comments here it sounds like there was a certain romanticism about writing/building and running your own BBS. It's not quite the same as spending 5 minutes to spin up a new Digital Ocean instance and running a Docker image.

I think that the achievement of some home-made appliance that was actually hard to get money-wise (and probably build) is one aspect of what makes those memories fond.

But I have another explanation, which, I think, explains much of it. Being a part of the BBS network meant one had overcome a bit of a hurdle and reached a small community that actually cared about the system and the sense of the community itself. Those BBS islands had their own rules, implicitly or explicitly spelled out, they were full with lots of creativity (cf. the ASCII/RIP art), and while the occasional troll or rude idiot can be found anywhere, posting something to a BBS usually meant you got some response back. It was a smaller circle (at least, it felt that way). You could actually make friends through the BBS network. Today, when I try to post something on HN, I cannot even find it immediately after posting, let alone hope that other people find my submission. :)

The SDF.org bboard feels much in the same way.

In my local calling area, the motives and reasoning were simpler. Some of us just wanted more TW2002 and LoRD instances. Some of us needed to cut the phone bill. And some of us did it to, well... 'do it' (cause there is nothing quite so attractive as power -_^).

You miss your childhood days, not BBS. Today's teenagers in 20 years will be talking about Snapchat days.

I agree about childhood days, but I don't know if that's entirely it.

I think we now take technology for granted and apps/sites are less special of a thing than BBSs were. Users are fickle, so much is fad-based, and we move on to the next thing without a strong feeling towards the last. Using Snapchat isn't a primary hobby or thing that you devote time to, more of a thing you do while doing some other primary thing. If that makes sense. :)

I doubt that memories of Snapchat will be as strong to a user as memories of BBSs. But who knows.

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