Comment by stiray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stiray | Hacker News Reader

One few little details about those times: official radio was broadcasting spectrum games at late night hours. You recorded the game and played it on computer.

On flea markets you could buy latest games on packs of around 30 on one cassette. Yugoslavia had no copyright laws and breaking software protections became national sport.

Computer magazines weren't full of reviews like today but rather full of electronics, software sources (that you have typed to your computer - I still remember that some genius started to add checksum at the end of endless DATA statements and give you a message that you have done an error in line x).

My first computer (c64) was smuggled from Austria under fathers car seat, at age of 12 I have written my first software (due to the large amounts of cheap games I got bored) and one of the coolest things to see were pirate intros packed with games. At 14 I was fully proficient with Amiga and Atari ST.

Those were different times, we didnt have 30 types of chocolate bars, zillions of different toys but we had a lot of imagination. Now, my country... the consumption has completely destroyed public morale, innovation and will to actually do something else than be pretty (boys included) and fit and well dressed at youth time, having latest phone and likes on your FB account. I had unique chance to see two very different parts of how society functions and I think we, as humans, are on wrong path.

"the consumption has completely destroyed public morale, innovation and will to actually do something"

When I talk to people living in the balkans, I don't get the feeling that abundance in products is destroying their morale.

Depends, us old people who saw both sides of the coin feel like today’s youth is crippled, they have no motive to study or be competitive, it’s mostly look pretty and be out with friends all day long.

Even the old Greeks complained how their youth is worse. It’s been quite a few generations since and we are still moving on.

Do you have a source for this? It is commonly attributed to Socrates, but this appears not to be true :

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrypha

I've heard being attributed to Hesiod from a talk by Adam Conover, but i've not investigated.

EDIT: sorry, apparently it's also a misquotation:

https://www.quora.com/Which-ancient-Greek-spoke-of-there-bei...

I was born in late 70s in Croatia (then Yugoslavia), moved in early 90s to Belgrade, Serbia, due to rise of nationalism and violence of official Croatian regime against Serbs. Not that official Serbian regime was any better in that regard, just against other nations, mostly Croatians and Bosnians.

I don't consider myself old, but I'm no "modern kid" by any measure.

What I observe among today's people of these regions (I travel and keep contact with people all over ex-Yugoslavia - mostly Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia), regardless of their age, is defeatism and lack of confidence. Most don't beleive they can invent, build or produce anything on their own. Everything needs to be imported.

It saddens me because ex-Yugoslavia used to produce computers, cars, electronics, aircrafts, hi-fi audio stuff etc. back in the 80s.

Closing of all these industries in 90s had devastating econimical impact, but that was later recovered - they mostly reopened but now under new multinational owners, producing parts for global brands. Smart and industrious people got their salaries back.

What hasn't recovered so far is belief that we can again invent and build for ourselves, not sell knowledge and skill to big global players at low price and then buy finished products at much higher price.

But then again I think this is not specific just to ex-Yugoslavia, it seems to be global trend.

> What I observe among today's people of these regions ..., regardless of their age, is defeatism and lack of confidence.

My personal experience (mainly from visits to Bosnia) confirms that. In my opinion, the ongoing brain drain is a main reason behind it. It's a rational choice for talented and motivated young people to move to a Western European country, thus many do so. Unfortunately, the result is that those not leaving have a very hard time forming a critical mass which could break through the various deadlocks left behind by the war years.

The old abundance paradox. When you have everything you appreciate very little. We have had the same problem with the middle class here in the US for half a century, but our national culture had a strong focus on competition, winning, and money.

Those old values are fading for better or worse, and it will be interesting to see what happens next.

It is a trope that every generation thinks the next generation is worse

I also think you're looking at Yugoslavia with nostalgic rose colored glasses. I understand it because I grew up in communist Eastern Europe and I have similar feelings about life back then, but let's be clear, everything was fine as long as you charted the expected course and had no major aspirations. If you had any sort of ambition, political, or economic, or if your personality trait tended towards contrarianism, you had to leave. It was also clear that European communist nations were being left behind by ever faster developing west. Had there was no market transition, you still would have had to import western electronics because our nations were never going to meaningfully compete in that sphere. During the time of Galaksija computer, the West was going through a much larger and much more broad and egalitarian PC revolution, and was only 10 years removed from the web. We were never going to catch up. The political structures of our nations, because they were monolithic an inflexible, were corrupt by the 80s. In my country the collapse resulted in social upheaval and very painful economic transition. In your nation, it resulted in many years of civil war.

Most people who grew up in Yugoslavia are fond of it, and they rarely factor the wars in their opinion. That said, prewar Yugoslavia was 1000x better than anything Warsaw Pact.

Slovenia was the richest federal unit within Yugloslavia and I guess that makes them the most successful experiment in socialism like ever. I think at that time they were doing better than the current Greece and Portugal. However, the rest of Yugloslavia wasn't that great.

Sarajevo in the 80s was pretty good and it was still behind Zagreb and Belgrade. I moved to northern Italy in 92 and the standard of living wasn't that much better for most people compared to a larger Yugoslavian city in the 80s.

It was very regional in Yugoslavia. For example, eastern Slovenia was behind Zagreb and some coastal areas of Croatia. It was behind cities like Novi Sad, Belgrade in Serbia and many others. Slovenia as a whole was of course better developed partly due to commerce/proximity with Italy and Austria.

We had 14 days of "war" and 19 killed and 182 wounded (official numbers - if you would took a book about history you would quite quickly figure out the war in Bosnia and Croatia was not due to change of system but due to cultural burden that was piling up for centuries).

But I will not go down that political rabbit hole or classical fallacy that every generation thinks the next generation is worse - no, not everything is better just for the fact that previous generation thinks it is worse.

I do believe that in your country was as you said it (which is imho normal - you lived there). For my country, let me judge myself (as I have lived "there").

>We had 14 days of "war" and 19 killed and 182 wounded

You can't praise Yugoslavia, and then fall back on Slovenia when Yugoslav failures are mentioned.

>you would quite quickly figure out the war in Bosnia and Croatia was not due to change of system but due to cultural burden that was piling up for centuries

Both are true. I think there is universal agreement that Tito's death set up the conditions for the eventual civil war. And yes, it is also no coincidence that the civil war was along ethno-nationalistic lines.

>For my country, let me judge myself (as I have lived "there").

That's fair, but I'm not sure if anything I mentioned was actually untrue or even controversial .. even if I didn't grow up in Yugoslavia.

Egalitarian PC Revolution? What are you smoking? PCs were only available to the very wealthy and only the fortunate and privileged could hope to break into that industry. The entire space also quickly became a copyright and patent minefield. If you look at the USA, given it was the centre of the PC and Internet revolutions, access to a PC for the average household had really slow uptake. We in the West have a horrible habit of only looking at the upper echelons of our society to see how we are doing while ignoring that the average household is poor as hell.

>Egalitarian PC Revolution? What are you smoking? PCs were only available to the very wealthy and only the fortunate and privileged could hope to break into that industry.

Yes. Egalitarian. The prices collapsed from a level where only the rich and businesses could afford them, to a level where EVERYONE could afford them. And to be clear, there were hundreds of different kinds of personal computers at all kinds of price levels. For example, the Commodore64 was priced at a very accessible $595 ($1600 inflation adjusted) in 1982.

>The entire space also quickly became a copyright and patent minefield.

Whatever problems or issues you can point to, you cannot deny the reality of broad adoption of computers in the span of a decade, a trend which continued through the Internet and Mobile revolutions. The copyright and patent issues clearly were not a hindrance.

>We in the West have a horrible habit of only looking at the upper echelons of our society

What are you talking about? My parents, who were recent immigrants at the time, working menial low-wage jobs, bought a personal computer in late 80s for our household. Trust me, we were not in the 'upper echelons of society', unless the 'upper echelons of society' pick strawberries to supplement income from another minimum wage job.

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