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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Computers are still fun and IMHO, they are more fun today than they were in the past: no more loud fans running at full whack, no more spinning rust slowing things down, no more expensive briefcase sized laptops with 40min battery life, operating systems where everything just works out of the box without fumbling over which floppy has the right driver that won't randomly crash the OS, fast internet and easy piracy, better malware protection and security out of the box, no more collecting stacks of optical media (ok, that was pretty fun), etc.

I cut my teeth into '90s computing but I wouldn't go back to those days.

People need to venture outside the walled gardens to discover the fun, but most people don't, as their smartphone with Instagram and TikTok is more addictive than checking out what they can do on a PC.

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I don't think computers are still "fun".

The distinct atmosphere of geeky fun that computing had in the 80s and 90s through the early 00s just doesn't exist anymore. Erased in favour of cleanliness because big monies and liabilities (and fragile fee fees) started to get involved. We will never see the likes of MS Office Assistants or whipping some llama asses ever again.

I still "like" computing as a hobby because I grew up on the stuff, but if I were a kid again today I wouldn't bat an eye at computing because there's no "fun" in it anymore. Nothing about computing today blows the mind, child or adult.

I feel you. We got our first computer in, I think, 1994? I was 12. It was a Gateway 2000 486 something. haha I can't remember the letters on the end. It was magic. Oh, and AOL of course.

It continued to feel that way because it was kind of newer territory to a lot of people in general. Now, it is just standard... everywhere... I think the mass adoption is the fun killer. It was much more niche back then.

Those were the good days, between me and my buddies we had a Pavkard Bell, a Micron, a Gateway 2000, and a home built or two. We played C&C, red alert, doom, quake, descent and some old fashioned board game Axis and Allies when we got tired on the computers.

Spot on. Awesome post. My first PC was a 1995 486 clone no name PC with a Cyrix (!!!) 57 MHz cpu and 4 megs of ram. Originally it came only with a floppy drive and a 420MB HD. I bought this sound blaster-like card with a CD-ROM drive attached to it and picked up Slackware Linux 3.0 distributed via a computer magazine. It wouldn’t install at first because the cd drive was attached via the sound blaster clone card so I had to install it via many floppies instead. I finally got it working. I really miss those days where things were hard and required work to make things seamless. Today even Windows runs Linux so there’s no incentive to geek out anymore.

>I don't think computers are still "fun". The distinct atmosphere of geeky fun that computing had in the 80s and 90s through the early 00s just doesn't exist anymore.

I disagree. It exists live and well but you must be looking for it in the wrong places.

You won't find it on any app store but they have moved to the Linux FOSS communities and projects, like KDE for example. Or even games from indie game studios that you can find on steam. Also look into communities developing game mods or OSS ports of classic games. Or people trying to run Doom/Quake on various devices. Or playing around with FPGAs. That's where the geeky fun is nowadays.

You can also still build your own PC instead of buying a prebuilt or a Mac.

If you're willing to look beyond the walled gardens and the mainstream billion dollar corporations and game studios, you'll find the fun.

>You won't find it on any app store but they have moved to the Linux FOSS communities and projects, like KDE for example. Or even games from indie game studios that you can find on steam.

FOSS and indies only care about ideologies, they are not the devs from the 80s and 90s who just had simple fun and gave us simple fun.

>Also look into communities developing game mods or OSS ports of classic games. Or people trying to run Doom/Quake on various devices. That's where the geeky fun is nowadays.

They're a different style of fun to the fun we're talking about.

>You can also still build your own PC instead of buying a prebuilt or a Mac.

I build all my computers (laptops aside, obviously), because pre-builts are a scam and waste of time.

>If you're willing to look beyond the walled gardens and the mainstream billion dollar corporations and game studios, you'll find the fun.

Been there, done that; 404 Fun Not Found. Nothing about modern computing evokes an innocent "Wow!" or snicker from me anymore, and I find that very sad.

>Nothing about modern computing evokes an innocent "Wow!" or snicker from me anymore, and I find that very sad.

It feels like there is fun out there to be had but for some reason (stubbornness? Rose tinted glasses?) you're not having any of it. Just this week I saw a 13 year old in a cafe coding something for Minecraft. I had no idea people did that but I enjoyed his enthusiasm and I learned something new that day.

Don't want to sound mean but maybe you've gotten old and your tastes have calcified trying to hang on to times long gone by instead of moving on and trying the new things on the menu.

My playlist is also stuck in the '80s but that doesn't mean there's no good music coming out now that I can also enjoy.

You're also free to pickup vintage computers and tinker with them, or even better, get into embedded and FPGA programming like I said before. There's a whole plethora of options out there that can WoW you. Something must fit you if you keep an open mind and not expect the '90s to come roaring back.

I'm an old dog myself and today there's way more cool stuff for me to tinker than in the old days, better and more open and easier to access tools I just like the free time for it.

> no more loud fans running at full whack, no more spinning rust slowing things down, no more expensive briefcase sized laptops with 40min battery life, operating systems where everything just works out of the box without fumbling over which floppy has the right driver that won't randomly crash the OS, fast internet and easy piracy, better malware protection and security out of the box, no more collecting stacks of optical media (ok, that was pretty fun), etc.

TBH i grew up with IBM PC compatibles (my "upgrade history" was PC XT clone, PC AT clone, AMD 386, Pentium MMX, Pentium 2, Athlon64 and then modern stuff) and i never remember thinking any of that being much of an issue - and i knew enough about PCs to have built my own since pretty much the first one (the PC XT clone i used was a bunch of randomly thrown components together) and programmed them since the beginning too.

Like sure, they most likely were things some people fussed about, but i never remember even thinking about these.

The only thing i always remember being an issue was floppy disks being horribly unreliable.

Also no more (well less) massive seat license type software / massive ass installs anymore to try new software.

I know folks hate the SaaS world to some extent but the amount that is available for me to try / use for a couple bucks a month is bonkers. I can try out dozens of different applications in the time it used to take me to install one beast of an application that took up a good chunk of my disk space...

I feel the opposite, the fact that computers were so limited in resources (in the late 90s for me as I am now pushing 40) made it more fun. These days, with all the space, iops and cores I could ever dream of, it’s like playing doom with god mode enabled.

Computers were more fun before Intel Management Engine (and the AMD equivalent) was a thing.

Feels like someone poked holes in all my condoms.

How exactly has IME ruined the fun for you? You know that it's valuable tool for IT admins and fleet management but you don't have to use it , right?. Has anyone ever been hacked through IME vulnerabilities?

I wish people would provide some valid arguments instead of spreading FUD.

> How exactly has IME ruined the fun for you?

The nagging knowledge that no matter how thoroughly I secure my environment it is insecure by design at a base level.

> you don't have to use it

Disabling Intel Management Engine is not a feature of the platforms that support it.

> Has anyone ever been hacked through IME vulnerabilities?

I could not say. Glad you at least acknowledge the vulnerabilities exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Securi...

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Edit since I can't reply to the post below:

It is not like being afraid to leave the house because a meteorite strike might kill me because staying at home does not afford protection from meteorites but using a system without Intel Management Engine does afford protection from its vulnerabilities.

I would say that your position is equivalent to saying "Why are you so upset about the skateboard on the staircase? People can fall down stairs without slipping on a skateboard and anyway as far as I know no one has slipped and fell on this skateboard yet."

"Just don't connect it to a public network, including the internet" (airgapping) is a solution to the vulnerabilities posed by Intel Management Engine but I expect most people who purchase computers featuring Intel Management Engine lack that understanding.

>The nagging knowledge that no matter how thoroughly I secure my environment it is insecure by design at a base level.

That's like worrying about leaving the house since a meteorite strike could kill you.

If you're that concerned about the security of your environment then you shouldn't connect your PC to the internet or any wired or wireless network regardless of having IME or not.

Everything you didn't design and build yourself from the ground up or which you can't thoroughly inspect and audit in detail is insecure by design and should be treated as such, IME or not, yet the entire world still functions just fine with billions of devices talking to each other over the internet because those are the pros of commonization of hardware and software while we have learned to minimize the security risks associate with that commodization.

The threat model you're scared of is easily solved by air gapped systems which is what we have at work in our secure environment making your perceived IME threat blown out of proportion.

> I would say that your position is equivalent to saying "Why are you so upset about the skateboard on the staircase? People can fall down stairs without slipping on a skateboard and anyway as far as I know no one has slipped and fell on this skateboard yet."

Well put. I've found this to be a common and annoying class of flawed discourse: comparing artificial problems of greater severity or potential to that of related but lesser natural and intrinsic problems as a justification for it being acceptable... you can apply the same reasoning to justify making everything as badly as possible, it's nonsense.

You might be confusing IME with AMT. AMT is the IT stuff, IME is a different class of stuff (you can't use it as a consumer).

It's unironically pretty sketchy if you're read the Wikipedia page for it.

AMT uses the IME.

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