I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You | Hacker News Reader

I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You

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51 pointstcmb12 comments

This wasn't a formal thing at all, but people on message boards would sometimes get together and watch old episodes of The Computer Chronicles. It's delightfully nostalgiac and really helped us to remember our fascination with technology and the World Wide Web:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT/videos

I really dislike titles of this form ("I love to do X, and so should you"). It might not be the most rational response, but I intuitively refuse to let some article in some magazine tell me what I should or should not do, let alone "love".

Just to be clear, I find the history of computing fascinating, and I have a big soft spot for old-school hardware. My heart still skips a beat when I hear a modem/fax screeching, and every time I visit my doctor who still uses a dot matrix printer, I smile when it does its thing.

> who still uses a dot matrix printer, I smile when it does its thing.

They're sold brand new on Amazon. Oki Data is still alive and kicking.

There's also new-ish fax machine models from the major printer companies.

My Dad would bring home piles of the in-between pages from the 130 column fanfold that would separate reports & print jobs from the dot matrix printers (the ones with horizontal green stripes on one side). That stuff was great for sketching, notes, projects, even placemats.

I'd buy loose 130 column fanfold "scrap" paper if that was a product!

This?

https://www.amazon.com/Sparco-Computer-Paper-Plain-Inches/dp...

This is the paper:

https://www.pdp8.net/images/greenbar.shtml

The 132 column dot matrix printers often used to have the sprocket drive _above_ the print head. So in order to get your report off the printer, you'd have to form feed a couple of times so you could tear off the report. This left you with reports & printouts that started with 1-2 blank pages, so it was common to remove those and put them in the pile of "scrap paper" (which was what my Dad used to bring home for us kids!).

No freaking way, a lot of these even still have rs232 and parallel interfaces. I’ve been needing an rs232 printer to go with some of my retro protocol analyzers.

It's a very common response. Such a suggestion ("you should/have to do this") takes away some degree of freedom of choice from you so automatic response is to resist that. Same reason why people loath situations like "let me show you this youtube."

What was fantastic, during this period, was Moore's Law. Just waiting one year, you could see hardware selling prices divided by two, that was magic.

BYTE Magazine was my favorite by far! A classic, along with Microsoft Systems Journal a close second.

Obviously you need yo know computer science history. Most of the major software engineering problems of current times were also present in 1969 conference on it. Technology works in cyclical nature. The failed solutions of past may work in current times.neural nets hit a roadblock in 80s because not fast enough computers. Now suddenly same fundamentals got application in machine learning. Cloud computing has parallels to thin clients of the past and faces similar problems

Computer Shopper! Alice And Bill!

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