Redditors share the way the world was 20 years ago | Hacker News Reader

Redditors share the way the world was 20 years ago

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83 pointssocratees55 comments

About twenty years ago I was trolling around the Internet explaining how Microsoft was going to screw over IBM and OS/2. I went by melling back then too:

http://www.skytel.co.cr/advocacy/research/1991/0817.html

And for hacking fun, I was enamored with Steve Jobs' NeXT computer. Among other things, I worked on the Tetris port:

http://www.artizia.com/tetris/contributors.html

A year later, I found my first developer job via the Internet and ended up in the NYC area. About a year out of college I bought a used 386 computer, got Linux running and a PPP connection, then I was back on the Internet.

Today, the Internet is just bigger and faster, while Steve's NeXT computer fits in your front shirt pocket.

> We played outside (there was nothing to do inside anyway)

Having happily spent hours playing with the dirt under a bush in my front yard with Star Wars action figures when I was young, lost in my imagination, aided by props, I lament the complete shift that has occurred for many kids. It's a sea change, and I was ecstatic recently when my toddler niece played in the dirt on my watch - only got caught because she got dirt on her cheeks - I hope she never loses that curiousity - her parents were away...

Now my nephews - my sister has successfully resisted the introduction of video games for at least six years - hope she can continue to fight. For when the video game console gets in, it will change expectations forever.

My son really loves video games but he spends way more time playing outside, including playing in the dirt with action figures (more often Mario figures than Star Wars, though).

There are no doubt kids who don't play in the dirt because of video games, but in my experience they're few and far between. Having watched my kids with lots of neighborhood friends, I'm inclined to think that if modern kids don't play outside as much, that's more likely to be because of lack of freedom (due to hysteria over child predators) than because of video games.

Many adults these days have very fond childhood memories both of playing outside and of video games — it makes me sad to think of a child missing out on either.

> my sister has successfully resisted the introduction of video games for at least six years - hope she can continue to fight.

idk. I bought my son a Nintendo DS when he turned 3 (reward for potty training). I'm really glad I did as he's already showing off some cool mathematical and logical thinking ability. There's good games and bad games, plusses and minuses as with everything. I think the key is variety and moderation.

I still don't play video games. Is there something wrong with me?

not really, not everyone plays a musical instrument either :/ Up to you what you enjoy.

I don't read novels.

Some would say there's something right about you.

And they would be completely wrong. Just like everything in life, it is about proportions.

Playing WoW in a cafe until you die: something wrong with you (even before the lack of heartbeat). Having an xbox party with friends once a month: nothing wrong.

It's all shades of grey in between.

I absolutely agree (though the people downvoting me probably don't think so.)

Where are you from? The US?

Is it normal to do potty training so late?

In all the research I've done, potty training begins when the parents decide they are sick of changing diapers and ends when the child is physiologically prepared. Happier parents and kids occur when those two dates are as close as possible.

Four kids, potty trained between two and four and a half (hence the research).

I'm from the UK. Potty training generally happens at age 2 or 3. To achieve full dry night potty training is usually more like age 3. However, it's pretty common for kids to need a lot more time to go through the night dry.

Talk about shaping the evidence to suit your hypothesis.

I don't know. I recently borrowed a book from a co-worker, a young mother, about potty-training. They talked about different approaches in different parts of the world. The author was American, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to cross-check what she wrote. (And most people on HN are from the US, that's why I assumed so.)

Some ofthe problem, at least in my part of Australia, is there isn't really any outdoors to play in anymore.

When I was a kid, house sizes were smaller and blocks were larger. The house I grew up in would have been < 100 square metres, and the block about 1000 square meters or so. This meant loads of backyard; we had a large workshop (loads of wood, tools etc), a chook run, a few fruit trees, some trees for climbing, paved area (concrete slabs) for bikes, some grass and a veggie patch. Now most houses are well over 200 square metres, and land much smaller. Many new housing developments near us call anything over 500m2 'large'

And beyond the house... when I was a kid there were large areas of natural bush land to play in/explore. Now they're pretty much all gone, replaced in part by (what we call) ovals - a grass playing area for footy/soccer and with perhaps a swing and slide in the sun. Not much fun.

Roads are busier too. We built a go-kart (non motorised) and my parents had no problems letting us tear down the local hill road in it. Street cricket or footy was also very common, but again, just not possible now

'That' Australia still exists, although it been displaced by the tentacles of many property developers and their sympathetic councils.

Move away from overcrowded big cities, and you will have all the room you desire.

They now produce TV commercials encouraging kids to play outside, presumably to reduce child obesity.

I'm only 25, and my parents steadfastly refused to buy me a video game machine when I was a kid, but this still flabbergasts me. Playing outside is something public service announcements on television are telling kids to do. What the hell?

My parents kept a stranglehold on things like TV and Video Games, and I'm glad they did. They slowly lost ground around the time I hit high school, but because of it I spent a literally obscene amount of time building things with Legos. I built some really cool stuff, too.

I was never much of a play-in-the-dirt kid, if I wasn't building something I didn't see the point. (sure, you can build stuff with dirt, but my imagination called for a bit more than dirt could manage as a building material)

20 years ago today people were very scared about what was about to happen to the Middle East. This was about two weeks before the first Gulf War erupted, and a lot of people thought (correctly) that Iraq would try to drag Israel into it.

I remember two technological developments that year: I saw email for the first time at the Boston public broadcaster WGBH, and one of the larger American airlines installed phones in the backs of economy seats (I still see them every now and then, but don't think they work anymore). The calls were expensive as hell.

Some people had car phones, and "beepers" had spread out from professional occupations to youth culture (the Tribe Called Quest song "Sky Pager" references this) but I did not know anyone who had a mobile phone in the US in 1990. I saw my first mobile phone in London in 1991.

GUIs were very widespread on campuses, but there were still a surprising amount of command-line based software being used in the workplace. At one of my first jobs at a UK record label in 1991 they had me using Word Perfect (?) which involved green text on a black screen, and lots of keyboard shortcuts. Aside from the email example mentioned earlier, every business I dealt with in 1990-1991 used faxes or the post to send documents.

EDIT: added beeper/mobile phone/GUI/fax recollections

A few odd couple short of 20 years ago, but nevertheless, Linux was a new wonder to me. Red Hat CDs came packaged with issues of a computer magazine. This was in India. 7 KB/sec was fast, and it lasted a burst or two per day. Was absolutely new to programing. Wrote a p2p service for sharing rpm packages, because downloading them from upstream was so slow. Wrote it in TCL, it went nowhere. But a few snippets of that code found its way into the tcl library.

Laser printers were a frightfully expensive piece of equipment and wasting toner bothered me. So went through ghostscript code to realize for the first time how beautiful code can truly be. Patched a part of the driver to handle economy mode.

Had it not been for FSF and open-source, I would perhaps have never learned programming. I did not major in CS, but for those who did, without FSF it would have been unaffordable.

Hmm.. I'm not that old (I'm 23) and a lot of this stuff was also normal when I was a kid. I wonder if things are that different for 8 year olds now (the stuff about being a kid and getting into trouble, I mean).

I had to dress up to go to church.

From the time I can remember forward, the rule was that I just had to be home...eventually. I couldn't actually spend the night in the woods, but I could explore them to my heart's content.

I rode my bicycle everywhere. I rode my bike to school starting the summer of 4th grade, 3 miles each way down a highway and through town, but I didn't even get killed a little bit.

If you wanted to know something, there was no Google or Wikipedia. You might be able to find out a basic fact if you had a set of encyclopedias. But most information, from important stuff to basic trivia ("who was in that movie?") was not available unless you had a reference book or went to the library and really searched.

Rumors, lies, media manipulation, thwarted by a few seconds of research. If more people bothered, it would be a better world.

Off topic, but obligatory Monty Python piece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

SEO and its opposite, Googlewash [1]. Writing on the Googlewashing episode in the New York Times, Stanford linguist Geoffrey Nunberg warned [2] that:

The rankings give disproportionate weight to opinions of the activists and enthusiasts that may be at odds with the views of the larger public. It's as if the United Nations General Assembly made all its decisions by referring the question to whichever nation cares most about the issue: the Swiss get to rule on watchmaking, the Japanese on whaling.

That seems quite prophetic now. And there are links between gaming the system for political gain then and now. [3]

Oh, and the feedback loop [4].

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/03/antiwar_slogan_coine...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/weekinreview/18NUNB.html

[3] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/28/web_politics_how_rea...

[4] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/26/britannica_slaps_goo...

What's the "20 years go" bit about? It's not in TFA's title.

Twenty years ago was (late) 1990, not $700 VCRs, no video games, or people kicked off of airplanes for wearing sweatpants.

> No Facebook or email. Long distance calling was expensive... Sundays were the days to call family and friends, because rates were cheaper.

I remember as a kid being told by my father to go play somewhere else, because I was bothering my mother who was on the phone long distance.

Even when I went to college in 1999, I remember it being an issue since not everyone's cell plan featured long distance included, but everyone came with a cell phone that had a number local to their hometown. People would end up racking up long distance charges on their cell phones just to call a friend in the next building over.

Thought: mobile data charges are the next generation's "long distance" (or are at least headed that way).

Yes, I'm currently paying $15/Megabyte on my iPhone. Nobody in Vancouver (Virgin, Rogers, Bell, Telus) is willing to sell me a "Pay-as-you-go MiFi) for a reasonable rate (< $200) - so I ended up buying a rogers Rocket-Stick for $150 and putting data on it, one day at a time for $15 @ 1 Gigabyte/day (or $5 for 50 megabytes/day - how's that for a curve), connecting to it from my MacBook Air for all my data needs.

The original poster is talking about way more than 20 years ago, as far as I can tell. It looks like his items cover a range, going as far back as 40 or 50 years ago, up to about 10 years ago.

" People lined up at banks on Fridays, to deposit their paychecks and withdraw cash for the weekend. If you ran out of cash over the weekend, too bad."

Not in 1990, that's for sure. Heck, in _1981_ we had ATMs all over my small town of Vernon, BC. Wikipedia (which _wasn't_ around in 1990, and I would sorely miss) tells me the first ATMs came into the United states around 1969 - and browsing through that article, the appear to be fairly common by 1975)

While ATMs were prevalent back in the 90s, what most people forget is that your ATM card was just that: a card that let you get money out of your account. The ability to use it as a VISA/MC came later. You still had to remember to get cash because you might not be near a machine for a while (they were only attached to banks) and you usually only had one credit card for big purchases and emergencies...

Yeah, those banks were slow getting on the bandwagon (for whatever reason).

I was working at a bank in 1977 (in the systems/apps group) when they installed the first ATMs in Tampa. It was an interesting time. The original development unit had to be moved across the street, from the data center to the main branch. So one Saturday, 6 guys got out there and pushed it down the sidewalk and across the crosswalk. Good thing no one from IBM was around, they would have freaked out. (it was an IBM 3614 ATM)

It was at least the early 90s before the first ATM showed up in the large central PA town I grew up in. I still remember waiting for the mail on Thursday for my dad's paycheck. My mom would sign his name and we'd go to the bank, same teller every week, and get $100 in cash and the rest into the checking account.

Okay, name the town with > 2000 people in the United States that didn't have an ATM until 1990. I'm genuinely curious as to how that came about.

It was Altoona, PA and in 1990 the population was somewhere in the 50,000 range. I'm not saying there were no ATMs just that I remember when they put the first one in at our bank. It was a big deal that they were giving out ATM cards.

There were ATMs all over Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1983. Hardly the World's greatest metropolis.

Aww, I remember the outside.

Seriously though, I'm grateful to my brother who's kept my nephews on a strict time limit and filter when it comes to TV and video games. They play outside and put their amazing imaginations to use.

You don't even have to be that old to remember most of that. Except for milk deliveries, well-dressed for airplane trips, and a few other things on there I remember how things were...

If you think about it, it's all before super cheap labor/parts from China, not just a technological gap.

One of my more earlier memories is standing in line for Star Wars. It went clear around a building or two and as a child it was the most spectacular thing to see that many people in a row.

Oh and I remember being given a nickel to buy a bagel. Damn I've gotten old :-(

This article is mostly only relevant to people under 20.

In my opinion, the real generation gap begins close to the current age of 22. People 22 or younger very likely had the internet in Elementary schools, a computer before they entered middle school (probably with the internet), video systems with 3D accelerators, broadband before they got out of high school, and Wikipedia for the entirety of their college career, among other things.

I remember the day a 56kbps frame relay circuit was installed in our house in 1997. It was connected back to my dad's office and I could use it to access the Internet via their connection. It was amazing the day that I didn't have to dial anything.

I think I was the only person who was in my freshman college class in 1998 that knew you didn't need disk up to connect to the Internet. Sharing that single T1 with 2000 other students sucked.

I'm 25. My first year or two of college, Wikipedia was around, but I knew more than Wikipedia about maybe half the subjects I looked up.

The nostalgia in this article really bothers me, in some ways. Maybe I'm just oversensitive, but it just seems like there's a lot of unacknowedged white male bias. Where are the women talking about how incredibly sexist everyday society was, or the black people talking about open, shameless racism?

I am about to take off on a plane so I don't have much else to say, but this was really bothering me.

> Where are the women talking about how incredibly sexist everyday society was, or the black people talking about open, shameless racism?

Really?

How about today's white self-hatred? I lived in Japan for quite a time, and it is a breath of fresh air not to year people go on and on about how ashamed you should be because god gave you a white skin (and that all social ills of other groups are due to you).

I think that's orthogonal to my point. All I was saying was that many of the answers presented only a majority view of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and that if you were to ask women and blacks what they thought, you might see some different answers.

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough, but I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out that you're only seeing one side of the story.

> year [sic] people go on and on about how ashamed you should be because god gave you a white skin (and that all social ills of other groups are due to you).

Also, maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd, or don't watch enough CNN, but I have never experienced this in my life.

About 25 to 30 years ago:

- I got my first computer: an Atari 400 computer with 16k of RAM and no storage, so I would write a program and then just turn it off. The OS and a BASIC interpreter also fit in that 16k so it wasn't hard to write a program that would be too big to fit into memory.

- The APPLE ][ was a spark of pure genius. The first time I played with it, it changed my life. I would walk a couple miles to the computer store on weekends so I could work on one. (I rememeber the Lisa and then Macintosh coming out and somehow not being impressed.)

- Software piracy was rampant. Software was sold through publishers, like books.

- Elephant memory was the cool makers of floppy disks. I had this big poster in my room: http://home.comcast.net/~kevin_d_clark/ems/ems-mag-ad-2-smal...

- My first modem was 300 baud. That was so slow, it took a second or so for each character to appear.

20 years ago today, I was getting ready to head back to my final semester of my undergrad in CompSci. I had just completed my last course that used the IBM 370 with Modula-2 (the base language for UND at the time). The Internet for me was mostly mailing lists and USENET. I so wanted a NeXT cube but there was no way I could afford it. My last papers were completed on a Mac SE/30. No class I had touched a GUI. The one class that had Lisp was a nightmare because the VAX had too little memory so the REPL became batch processing with 2 or more students working at the same time. The only computer I bought was an Atari 130xe to replace my old 400, and all it was used for was electronic fun with the joystick/paddle ports (or the occasional MULE game).

I'm 17 and this makes me wonder what my generation will write about in 20 years. Pretty crazy how many things change in such a short period of time.

No one mentioned burning ants with a magnifying glass.

I made a database for my LP's (and maybe a CD or two) in Turbo Pascal on my dad's laptop. Yes, he had a laptop. It was a Compaq with a 386DX20 and a grayscale screen. I didn't really know any sorting algorithms so I came up with the world's worst bubblesort. I think it was O(n³), possibly O(n⁴).

Note: my memory is a bit fuzzy, this might have happened anywhere from 1990-1993.

One comment talks about "rewinding cassette tapes".

Rewinding rental videos was a pain. I remember my local store used to find people for not rewinding rental tapes.

I still make that joke when I return DVD's sometimes. I would open it and look at the DVD as I return it, and say 'just checking that I rewinded it' - the 18 year old clerks have no idea what I am talking about.

The "spin it using a pen" technique was the true winner.

Until you did one spin wrong and it would start spinning the other way :)

It's interesting though that the most common 6-sided pencil would fit perfectly for the cassettes. Had the hole been just a bit bigger or smaller and it wouldn't have worked.

I remember a friend in junior high using a pen to rewind to spare his walkman batteries…

We did it because Pioneer car stereos took forever to rewind. They went faster on fast forward then the rewind (so flip, ff, flip). I really wish I could get a transcript of the meeting that affected the rewind speed.

Almost everything in this discussion can be simulated by not having digital appliances: No instant communications, photos, information, banking, trade, or travel.

Basically:

You had to be more diligent when taking care of business; You had to be clean when going places (no pajamas on a plane); There was no bull security theatre when travelling; There were fewer distractions for children.

20 years ago I was about 2 months old. I don't remember shit.

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