Ask HN: 70s and 80s were the golden days of computing?

Meh. It was fun in a different way, but man, trying to get even basic things working was a pain. The tooling sucked, documentation was terrible, community was whatever happened to be physically nearby (or a local BBS if you had a modem), compiling took hours (10 hours to compile a BSD kernel on a 68030), you needed specialized, expensive equipment for so many things, compatibility sucked, storage was expensive, UX wasn't a thing so user interfaces were crappy or sometimes downright unusable, "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand" neckbeards...

It wasn't until the mid-90s that things started to suck less. But a lot of people remember the hacker days of the 70s and 80s with rose tinted glasses (probably with a little help from that Halt and Catch Fire TV show).

Different, not better. The stuff you can do today is astounding, and for cheap. Languages are plentiful and powerful. Help is almost guaranteed on anything. Open source everywhere. Open protocols everywhere. Open collaboration everywhere. AI does your grunt work. Run-anywhere is a real thing. If anything, I'd be tempted to call NOW the golden age...

All humanity getting connected & building out the web medium was a blast. Computers were getting so much faster so quick. Linux was available & had great shell options, and even windows had a sea of wild custom shells. Hard to beat the aughts.

Depend on what you consider to be computing and what are golden days. Computers were not so widely available. In my country only Universities and big companies had them. Magnetic tapes and punch cards were used for data entry. In the 70s there were no personal computers. In 80's Spectrum, Commodore, Amstrad, Amiga, Atari and some other local computer brands entered the schools and homes. Companies were mostly using "dumb terminals".

If you where in computers then and if you worked on them you were possible on the forefront. Internet was still a new thing. Before it we had BBSs as places where we would gather.

Most of the knowledge was in books and magazines. They were hard to obtain.

We are at the point of diminishing returns now technology wise - displays are 4K pixel perfect, audio is better than any human can hear, disks are crazy fast, cpus and gpus are fast - so there's no longer the thrills of pushing boundaries.

Now it feels like we have gone into the "corporate" phase - choosing which framework to use, monetizing youtube videos, gaming social media, pushing latest shitcoin, etc.

Everything now seems to be about money and scamming vs the love of it.

As a kid I loved this show:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(TV_series)

Fun show. Reality however set in quick for a kid. My parents could barely afford a commodore 64. A rich kid did however give me a modem but even he didn't know what to do with it. I settled on copying all his games by cutting the tab in the floppy disk. I must have had hundreds of games on the cheap.

It's true for me. But, that was the age I was and that was the age of wonder. It was glorious, and I still remember it. Should you be younger, I'm sure it was the 90's or the aughts. Depends on where one stands.

"In my day we only had zeros. We had to pound half of then into ones manually."

I love that era because we knew in our bones there was something more to computing than IBM mainframes, but we hadn't built it yet. AND we didn't know enough to know what the limitations of microcomputing and telecommunications might be. Someone might pipe up and say something like "in the future, I'll be able to download any song by any artist!" and we would laugh and then realize it was possible. But this was before we understood the economic constraints that limit music streaming to a pretty pitiful subset of what's available. I mean sure, you can download any Katy Perry song you want, but it would be cool if I could get the ACTUAL Ministry or Smiths recordings from the 80s instead of later remixes or re-recordings.

And we were idealists, we has snorted Adam Smith as undergrads and emerged as utopian libertarians. We had yet to understand the role of tech isn't first to provide a service, but to make a banker some money. If we could stream the album version of "low spark of high-heeled boys" we could repeat the line about how the man in the suit just bought a new car on the profits he made on your dreams. I guess we can stream it off youtube, but there'll be ads involved. There is no free market utopia here, just a never ending stream of rent seekers.

And speaking of rent seeking, what did we do to be saddled with the "philosophical technical debt" of the block-chain. Decades later and we're still looking for a killer app for it. Imagine a world where our young engineers said something other than HODL HODL HODL in job interviews. (this is a joke, they sometimes also say "red black tree" in interviews.)

The late 70s / early 80s was a time when our capabilities were starting to match our dreams. Not so much that new things were possible, but that they were affordable. Putting a real computing device on someone's desktop for under $1000 was revolutionary. And we got a flood of new peripherals and software. You could buy a mouse for your IBM PC in 1982 and the Apple Lisa showed us a vision of what might be.

Suddenly, every weird bit of tech was becoming affordable.

But in the 90s we found a set of peripherals we liked: lcd screen, crappy keyboard, decent CPU, but most importantly, 802.11b. Hardware innovation shifted into "cost reduced mode." No one would fund funky peripherals just because they were funky and cool. (Side note... the first voice recognition system I used was on a TI 99/4 in 1981)

And I would argue the 90s was a great time to be a software engineer. Old dogmas were falling left and right. Java was new and hadn't yet been festooned with XML turds and every language feature a 21 year old Stanford CS grad could want.

But it was also the rise of python... huge monoliths of functionality you didn't dare try to modify. Sussman commented that in the old days we made complex systems from simple systems. Now we're given complex monoliths and we spend our time devising experiments to figure out how they work (since the documentation is NEVER complete.) I think he was talking about Python, but the same thing holds double for Machine Learning.

The 80s was the heyday of data structure and algorithmic research, now we just use hash maps (when I interviewed at Amazon, my interviewer, a recent CS grad couldn't remember what a linked list was and the last time I was on StackFault, it was a bunch of people laughing at the old guys for declaring data structures that ended in one byte character arrays.)

Yes, I'm old. Old enough to remember when the MCP was just a chess program.

When was the last time you met a kid in a Computer Science curriculum who was just plain interested in computing? They're all in it cause they heard you could bank coin as a software engineer. I'm sure that's not true, but the ones that are in it for the money are drowning out the ones that have legit intellectual curiosity.

But can you blame them? You go to Stanford or ucb, get a CS degree and immediately progress to getting your first round of funding for... what? Dating on the block chain? Rideshare for bicyclists? When I was your age I was writing systems to control nuclear power plants. We did not use Agile. We wrote a lot of tests.

All is not doom and gloom though, I am happy to report I meet a lot of young people with a legit ambition to make the world a better place. But it's sometimes hard to see them through all the chaff.

I think there's just as much gold in the 2010's and 2020's, it's just that it's a lot harder to see with all the horseshit.

But dig through it. You'll eventually find your pony.