Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

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Watch it. Wars were started for less.

The Spectrum was my first ever computer, and the Commodore 64 my second.. Or rather, our computer, as it was shared by the adults in our family and their adult friends, who only let me use it with supervision so I wouldn't break anything. :)

My best memories from that era are the MAGAZINES.

The art, the wacky reviewers (some of them fictional characters), the slang, the in-jokes, the readers' letters, the tips, the maps, the type-in programs, the pull-out posters, previews, developer diaries..

It really was a great time to be growing up, and computers and video games were the best hobby, because there was never a period when there wasn't something NEW.

There was always something to be amazed at. Always something to look forward to. New software and new hardware were constantly coming out. All other interests seemed so dull and uneventful. Ooh, 16 colors! then ooh, 32! then omg, you won't believe this, 256!!

Entire genres being born right before your eyes. Sound channels were also increasing, music the kind you didn't hear anywhere else, speech synthesis to call your friends naughty words with, mice like they used in posh offices, game controllers like in that arcade your parents never let you stay long enough in, new operating systems... what's an operating system? Why do we need one? Computers run just fine without it..

I wouldn't pick any other childhood.

I fantasized about owning an Amiga but the C64 was good enough too. I still remember the very first game I played on it and its music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slBHx5_8fms

I had the exact same childhood. Somehow I feel that the limited resources of the computers back then made the games more fun and original. There was a lot of creativity. People would come up with new concepts all the time, you never knew what the next cool games would be like.

Another notable point is that not everybody had a computer (at least where I lived). Something like 10-20% of the kids were actively using their computer, so you could be part of a tribe.

It was also easy to get into programming. The OS presented itself as a basic interpreter, and any manual that you would buy with your computer would explain how to write simple programs.

It was definitely a particular era. I wonder if there is something equivalent today. What do 8-years old kids do nowadays? besides watching youtube videos.

There's quite a big community around Scratch, also with Python on Raspberry Pi (at least in the UK), but nothing on the scale of the 80s.

Sure, but it's hard to compare that to the home computer era, we were the first generation with a computer of our own, and grown-ups had literally no clue. The systems where very limited and the gaps had to be filled by the imagination. It was a magic time in history that won't return.

> It was a magic time in history that won't return.

That is such a true and sad realization..

I guess it applies to other fields of technology which have rapid progress at the start and there's a lot of room to explore and few visible boundaries.

Like seafaring. When people first invented boats they had literally the entire world made open to them, that they could previously only imagine.

Personal computers were like the invention of seafaring for the mind.

I guess the next frontier like that is space, where literally the entire universe is waiting to be discovered. :)

A few days ago our 8 years old was asking my wife how she got introduced to computers. She described how she transcribed with the help of her sister games listings from magazines to her C64. When she described how the process took a few days long of typing hex number he was completely astonished. My wife and I, both having the same background, looked at each other unable to express the marvel of succeeding in getting it to work, often times after numberless tries, to a child whose primary reference of a computer is an iPad. Later we discussed how grateful we were to having lived in such an era where the sheer naïveté allowed us to learn and experiment in ways now out of reach.

Typing in programs from magazines was one way to learn how to program. After a while you couldn't help but pick up some knowledge about the machine.

TRS-80 Model 1 and Byte magazine for me. Thanks for bringing back good memories.

Fantasized getting an Amiga, but a colleague recommended this new "Mac" computer that seems geared to designers. And so it went...

Oh man, the magazines. I did a lot of growing up following along with the Your Sinclair crew. If I'd been ten years older I might even have got more than half the jokes.

Yep, T'zer, Gordo Greatbelly... or were they Sinclair User? And Lloyd Mangram and the rest of the ZZAP! gang. For me they were all one big cool clique that felt like the friends I never had.

Since the decline of gaming magazines the Western game industry hasn't really been able to recapture that feel of .. glam.

> If I'd been ten years older I might even have got more than half the jokes.

Same, and they were my first exposure to naughty stuff too. I couldn't understand why my folks didn't want me looking at that Game Over ad or Martech's Vixen poster (with Corinne Russell) for too long, or why my older friends wanted to "borrow" those magazines so often hah

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