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Comment by kar1181 | Hacker News Reader

I have been reading Fabien's book over the past few nights and it has been enormous fun.

Programming for most of us has moved a long way from the metal our code eventually executes on. And it's quite fun to go real low level and understand at an almost atomic how to make a computer do what you want it to do.

That's why this (and Michael Abrash's earlier Graphics Black Book that served as inspiration for this)is so much fun. As an kid who grew up playing games on these machines at that time it all seemed like magic. With quality documentation and the power of nostalgia you can now fully understand (and appreciate) what the likes of Carmack achieved in the early 90s on these machines and now we too can go in and hack around and achieve the same results.

I hope the book does well and Fabien can do the proposed 486 and Pentium companion editions.

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On an emotional level, the further down the stack, the more excited and enthralled I am, and the higher up, the more disillusioned I am with how and why things are done. I've been looking for a foot in the door to embedded.

I agree, I hope this does well. Born around the time to be in "suitable age" when Amos the creator on Amiga, and similar things, where the foshnizzle.

This is a really cool thing with today though - the technical barrier to creating and publishing physical books (and ebooks too of course) is just so so low. Making it financially viable and worth it is another thing. I certainly hope this does well and will buy a physical copy.

Agree, indeed barriers to entry in computing generally is getting lower and lower all the time. The issue is that computers are so good now that the need to 'play around with them' is getting less and less. But for those of us that remember peeking and poking memory addresses and programming by trial and error can recognise how good we have it today.

Not sure I agree. Entry into computing is definitely getting easier, but it's decelerating due to a number of factors, namely the slow death of Moore's law and the huge amount of data you need to crunch to create useful solution. Tech is improving, but it feels like we're falling off the exponential into something more linear.

As computer performance improvements decelerate, we're starting to see more specialization into particular tech verticals. This specialization makes it harder for people to break into.

For example, it used to be that if you wanted to crunch more data in Excel, you'd just wait six months for the better intel chip. It was faster and easier to do that than write custom software. Now the new chips are only marginally better than the last, and we need to rely on distributed systems linking dozens or hundreds of computers.

A 10 year old kid in the 1990s could easily create and launch a website from scratch, which was the state of the art medium at the time. It will be far more difficult for a 10 year old in the 2010s to grab terabytes of data and process it easily.

But that's moving the goal posts...? It's significantly easier to launch a website from scratch today, there are even more frameworks with very easy to follow tutorials and hello world-examples to extend to also make it look good. One simple one-liner copy for eg bootstrap.

What's changed is that it is today even _possible_ "for a 10 year old in the 2010s to grab terabytes of data and process it". Wait a little while for the "easy" part :)

My point is more about the rate of change. If computing power continued to increase in the 2010s at the same rate it was increasing from the 1950s through mid 2000s, that 10yo kid would be playing with terabytes of data on his laptop.

> It's significantly easier to launch a website from scratch today,

Write HTML, copy to server, press f5/open URL. It doesn't get easier than the 90s in that regard. You didn't even need a framework for that, so ... I'm not so sure.

I was mostly thinking of the "copy to server" step. I was about to say that now there are many providers and platforms etc, but now thinking about it, there were plenty even back then. Perhaps, if you just have a small nugget of something you want out there, today you can just paste it on pastebin/twitter/instagram or any other platform...

I think you've really forgotten how hard the copy to server step could be in the 90s

I'm pretty sure I've used a ftp client back then too, which wasn't so hard, but sure, it's been a while, my memory may be faulty here.

I was more thinking about getting an internet connection and a server

Sign up with ISP, fill out phone number & info into modem settings, click connect, wait, use ISPs server space they provided for free to each customer. Done?

In many ways I find that easier than dealing with cable companies and their systems.

A basic internet connection was easier in some ways. There were disks with free hours all over the place. And hosting wasn't hard. Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire, ISP-provided hosting were all available, and easy enough for me to figure out when I was 10 years old. I had a few sites up on Geocities in the mid-to-late 90s.

Uhh... Write HTML, git commit, press F5 ? No frameworks needed.

We have to move the goalposts, otherwise we'd still be talking in terms of attaching stones to sticks.

The comment was about the reduction of progress, which is like talking about derivative functions. The value of the function is the goalpost, and it moves.

> A 10 year old kid in the 1990s could easily create and launch a website from scratch, which was the state of the art medium at the time.

I disagree, because i was that 10 year old kid in the 90s who fantasized about having his own website and domain - but had no idea how to go about the domain and the only way i knew for making a website was to keep my computer online all the time. So all i did was to make random "fake" sites in Netscape, pretending to be the real thing :-P.

Today it is so easy it is a no brainer. Of course at the same time, since it is so easy now, nobody is impressed by that anymore :-P.

I was the 10 year old kid who signed up on Geocities and followed the instructions to put up a site. I didn't care about owning a domain; almost everything I went to was on user-generated sites, hosted on the major webhosts.

Yes!

One thing I never get tired of is taking stuff apart. I can rarely reassemble them, alas, but such is life. I see it as doing my part to ease recycling of electronics. In fact, I let my then 2-yo daughter help me take the family color laser printer apart last year. Great fun, great fun.

Now, a couple of things one can do as a curious adult is buying a simple embedded system such as Atmel-based arduino, TI MSP430 Launchpad, or STM8-based devboard, for just a couple of dollars. Set up a toolchain and a LED blinker project, programming in C (asm is a little bit _too_ low level to start with, while Arduino is a little bit too high).

Yeah, the deeper I go into CS, the more it reinforces the idea that learning things makes them more interesting. Sounds obvious, I guess, but you wouldn't know it from how turned off people are to books or online lectures.

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