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Comment by nmeagent | Hacker News Reader

This article immediately brought to mind a particular conversation in season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

Jenny: "Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?"

Giles: "The smell."

Jenny: "Computers don't smell, Rupert."

Giles: "I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no no texture, no-no context. It's-it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly."

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The first computer shop that I went to as a kid (back when computer shops were a thing) had a very distinct smell that still evokes very strong memories for me now. I guess it probably wasn’t the computers themselves, but maybe that foamed rubber material used for mousepads and such, plus maybe some static charge in the air from CRTs or something? Any time I catch that smell, I’m immediately back playing Loom and Monkey Island and oogling at Pentiums and 1 GB hard drives.

Dust burning in those monitors perhaps?

Are things just not as fascinating now? Is there anything similarly cutting edge today. I know that part of it I was much younger but I also remember most of the people around were way older and seemed to share in the wonder and amazement at those GB+ hard drives and the thought of 32mb of ram.

I guess there's just not anything new that's advancing so rapidly.?.? Like my computer is 13 years old and is still overpowered for 99% of tasks. And they are still selling brand new computers with far lower specs. Imagine in 1997 being satisfied as a developer with a computer from 1984!

I also have other interests and it feels like they have plateaued similarly. I guess I'm still getting some dopamine from solar and battery tech, price drops at least, and some neatness around microcontrollers and IOT but like even food has stopped seeming innovate. It used to be worthy of a day trip to drive into the city to eat at new exotic offerings and now every small town has mostly the same stuff and there's nothing really new in the city either.

You missed out on 3d printers in the last 2 decades apparently. Those have gone leaps and bounds from very rickety prototypes like the og MakerBot to cheap workhorses. Stepper motors used to cost like $75 ea and are now like 4 for $15.

Smart phones as well.

Many of these things you don't notice till they're everywhere.

If I spent more time I could list many other things I think but I don't know your filter

Please list more things if you have some time

Electric bikes and scooters

The last two decades seemed to have progressed glacially slow.

We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops.

3D printing has come a fair way, but we're still not printing cars at home. (I totally would download a car.)

Now all of a sudden we have AI/ML, self-driving cars, high fidelity consumer mocap, AR/VR. The types of things coming out now seem way more sci-fi, cutting edge, and optimistic. A return to the imagination and dreams of the 1950's - 1990's.

2000 - 2020 was a speed bump.

From 2000 to 2010 we progressed from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.

The point is more - today's smartphones are the first iphone with a better camera and faster data connection.

That said in other areas there's much more improvement, for example EVs, solar panels, intelligent search engines. Remember the days when we used scripts that would parallelize searches over lycos, yahoo, webcrawler, altavista, alltheweb, ...

The counter point is that the innovation never stopped, it just moved down a level. We 'optimized' the hardware (as in gave it sufficient form to fulfill necessary functions) then did the same for the application space. Twitter, Facebook, Google, music streaming, all solidifying their phone presence over the past ten years.

Just as the application space has begun to stagnant, suddenly our data is speaking back to us through LLMs. Such models will be the next space we'll 'optimize', but these models will also be optimizing themselves. Strange loop.

> Twitter, Facebook, Google, music streaming, all solidifying their phone presence over the past ten years.

I would argue these are all worse outcomes than I'd hoped for.

I dreamed we'd have utilities based on RDF and bittorrent that could pull down any data we liked. Track any authors across the internet, highlight all content about topics we liked, pull in all new astronomy photos. Automatic ranking and scoring to fit our preferences. Better collaboration, much higher signal, much less noise.

I thought we'd control the data, the pipes, the routing, all of it.

We have a product manager internet, not a magical utility knife internet.

In 2001 you could get the Kyocera Palm phone, which is a more valid comparison. But yes.

Nokia also released 9210 about the same time as 3310. From that perspective iPhone was even less of an improvement and a step back in some aspects.

I totally would download a car.

Underrated reference. Well done.

> We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops.

For the past few years they've been experimenting with foldable screens, with hints of rollable screens maybe coming soon, so that's something at least.

I feel like you must be intentionally exaggerating for a reason.

Between the processing power, battery life, storage space (100x), ram (50x), screen resolution (20x pixels) and refresh rate, not to mention network speed…

I can record 4K video at 60fps. On my phone. How is that an incremental improvement?

I consume a huge amount of the web on my phone (and not hate myself or constantly zoom in and out), can type meaningfully fast with swipe/trace, copy/paste to/from my laptop, can use my phone as a webcam (realtime), useful realtime navigation, I pay for the majority of my purchases by holding my phone to a sensor, I put completely wireless incredibly light earbuds that last hours in my ears for listening and talking that actively cancel noise.

Today's phones are incredible.

On the other end of the spectrum, the cheapest smartphones can be purchased for less than $10.

Most of what you've listed is "take this number, make it larger", same as the past century. Foldable and rollable screens are actually something new.

Have the 3D printers that are affordable and available enough for regular people advanced in their material capabilities much? The inability to print high strength materials like high impact polycarbonate or metal was what made early 3D printers mostly a novelty for me. I didn't think that had changed; however, I could very well be wrong.

What you're experiencing is largely that now everything is nearly instantly discoverable. In the 1980s and 90s, you would find out about new technology or product at a computer store. You might read an article in a computer magazine about a technology, but for a product, you're as likely to learn about it from a knowledgeable clerk. And clerks had to be knowledgeable because they were that initial discovery mechanism.

Now, you find out about a new technology or product instantly, and you learn about them constantly. It is rare that a company develops something new enough that it's significantly differentiated from something you already know about (or even have) that it's exciting.

Even Apple had a lot of leaks before Vision Pro (which is potentially the most exciting new technology product, at least for me, in years). They had to balance when to announce it with the leaks - to maximize the impact while ensuring you didn't have to wait too long to get one.

I think you're missing the point. Even the Vision Pro is just incrementally better than Hololens almost a decade later.

> the Vision Pro is just incrementally better than Hololens

Hololens had 1268x720 per eye[1] or 1.8MP across both eyes. Vision Pro is 23MP across both eyes. Are you seriously saying that's "incrementally better"? It's a literal order of magnitude more pixels!

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/419869/we-found-7-critical-h...

If that order of magnitude more pixels doesn't enable people to do more, make the old and impractical the new and practical, or even leave people with the desire to upgrade, I would argue that order of magnitude more pixels could be incrementally better.

Then again, sometimes incremental ends up sneaking up on us and being revolutionary in the end. There are many technologies that appeared in the 80s (if not earlier), yet did not turn out to be practical until several decades of incremental development happened.

I’ve personally used a HoloLens, and I would consider it not useful outside of very specific edge cases. The viewport is extremely small (as in, most of your vision is not the hologram despite it still restricting your vision considerably), it’s hazy, low res, not very bright, and objects were not perfectly stable. It still was exciting as crap to use one, but a HoloLens vs the hardware of the vision pro is about on par with an original PlayStation vs a PS5. It’s more than a generational leap. I haven’t seen a vision pro in person, but I’ve seen a Vive, and that’s already leaps and bounds above a HoloLens in quality. The HoloLens works differently than the vision pro, which is really an extremely sophisticated VR headset, so they’re not even the same product category really. A HoloLens is more similar to a Google Glass.

That said, AR goes back decades with the early implementations being as primitive (if not more primative) relative to the HoloLens as the HoloLens is to the Vision Pro. While every new step may see the technology become more desirable and it may even garner higher adoption rates, it has no impact upon the lives of most people. Heck, as far as I can tell, it has no indirect impact upon the lives of most people. While the specifications may grow in leaps and bounds, I wouldn't really call it a technological leap until it has a greater impact.

(That said, the Vision Pro is a bit young to tell how much of an impact it will have.)

It's still 'vertically scaling' the number of pixels of hololens like devices. That might have needed innovations in manufacturing, but the product itself is not much of an innovation in my book.

That's honestly very similar to saying "4K Blu-rays are just incrementally better than VHS", by ignoring most of the differences and just considering that they're both media for video.

And yet, you're doing exactly the same thing with both. The experience is better, and there's some novelty with extra features you can interact with (though aside from subtitles, I don't think I've ever used them myself).

In terms of what they do for the user the difference is, in fact, incremental compared to when VHS first became available. VHS enabled you to choose what to watch whenever you wanted. Prior to that, you got whatever was on whatever channels you had access to.

I will definitely grant that enabling subtitles was a profound difference for a subset of viewers (those who enjoy foreign media and the deaf) but even that came about with DVDs, not Blu-ray.

> enabling subtitles was a profound difference for a subset of viewers (those who enjoy foreign media and the deaf) but even that came about with DVDs, not Blu-ray.

Closed captions were available on many, but not all, VHS tapes. Not all DVDs had subtitles either. The problem with CC on VHS was that it was often the first thing to degrade before the picture and then the sound.

Foreign films often had subtitled releases "baked in" to the video. Here's another hit of nostalgia. There were times you'd walk into a Blockbuster in the USA and the only available version of a hot new Hollywood release was the Spanish or French subtitled version. You had to deal with the lost sections of image dedicated to subtitles in a language you might not even understand!

It feels like the consumer base is much less diverse than it used to be. Tech used to look like a cornucopia of different shapes, colors, features. Now it's all the same. Twenty years ago the "gaming phone" was an Ngage and the "fashion phone" could pass for a tube of lipstick. In 2023 the "gaming phone" has an extra pair of invisible touch sensors and the "fashion phone" comes in pink.

The smell of a newly opened rewriteable CD

Wow, I can still evoke the memory and scent of that first spindle of blank CDs I bought for my 1x CD writer. It's so distinct and unforgettable.

the short answer is pretty much all tech we use was invented in the 1970's and is just being iterated on at this point. There really is not much new coming out and all the really cool stuff has turned out to be too difficult to be reliable or require too much power to ever get beyond toy status.

It was more than the rate of progress, though the rate of progress certainly helped. For a lot of people the computers of the 70's, 80's, and 90's captured their imagination because of how it could change the world. The same could be said of prior technological revolutions.

Even though we see a lot of technological progress these days, we are mostly out of the revolution phase. The computer is a part of our lives, much like electricity, the automobile, and the airplane. Those who love gadgets will be excited about each new step, yet it is nowhere near as exciting to everyone else. That is not to say that we are out of the revolution phase. People were genuinely excited about developments in mobile phones until a few years ago. This current hubbub over AI may stimulate people imaginations if it doesn't end up stalling again.

I chuckled at your comment about a 1997 developer being satisfied with 1984 technology. It seems like some 2023 developers are excited about 1984 technology. In many cases, it is because the tooling for things like build your own computers at the component level has become more accessible (rather than being an exercise in pure nostalgia).

I don't know what you smelled. But this conjured up the image of an old blue mousepad I used as a kid (and the smell!). Well done.

It reminded me of a similar sentiment by Marcel Proust:

“So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.”

We call it "Madeleine de Proust" in French.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_de_Proust

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

"Proust Effect" or something like that in English.

I think I've seen "Madeleine Moment" most often in English.

Funny i know about Proust from The Sopranos.

If we're sharing I learned about him from the preeminent Proust scholar in the United States, while I watched Little Miss Sunshine.

Same

When i'm sawing wood and the dust starts smelling burnt, I'm immediately transported back into my late dad's workshop. Easily happens when the teeth are wearing out. Also, somehow the fumes of his sigars smelled very similar.

Computers can be smelly, too. Ever booted up your old Windows 95 box from the basement? The dust blown from the fans has a particular smell. It is even more dramatic for real vintage computing like punch card machines, which smell very oily, in a similar way like very old cars and planes.

Indeed so. Once in my youth I brought my Amiga 500 to a friend's place, and he had a cat that peed on the edge of it.

The computer was ok, but it was basically a flood of cat pee seeping in into the memory expansion slot underneath.

Tried everything to get rid of the smell. Including perfume. Didn't make it better. Especially when it got hot.

Still today, when I smell cat urine I instantly think of Motorola 68000 assembly.

> Still today, when I smell cat urine I instantly think of Motorola 68000 assembly.

I did not expect to read that today. Or ever.

When a friend incorrectly wired up an AT power supply, causing the power cord to explode on power up, that made a distinctive smell.

Relevant:

Ooops, I forgot to put the paste on the processor

My personal snafu was plugging a 9 pin CGA cable into 9 pin serial port. White smoke started billowing out of the power supply. Turned it off, fixed the provision, and the computer still worked after that.

I love the smell of doing a good wipe on my hardware by sticking all of it in the microwave.

The smell of burnt silicon in the morning is what keeps me waking up everyday.

Computers can be smelly, too

Yep. The specific smell of the VOCs burning off a new Commodore 64 or 1541 brings back a flood of memories of cold, dark Winter evenings standing in the driveway waiting for the UPS guy.

I feel like this could be rendered as a 16 bit screen saver.

Disassembling and building computers as a teen, the smell of a freshly booted motherboard was almost intoxicating. The clicking and buzzing of the floppy drive. Crackling of the screen. Warm hum of the fan. It all transported me to another world where anything was possible.

The complaint is more websites don’t have a distinct smell.

Walk through a library and a dozen different books can all have distinct smells. Perhaps this book was taken to the beach a few times while that that one used a slightly unusual glue. Based on book age and the publisher involved you can even encounter similar smells looking at different copies of the same book at different libraries.

So yes a computer has a distinct smell the way a library does but that smell doesn’t change based on the knowledge you’re browsing.

Maybe we all need DIY home fragrance printers: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-create-a-home-fragrance...

HN posts could deliver your favorite fragrance for high points articles or deliver something undesirable for articles, say, about Rust (I kid, I kid).

I am from eastern europe, my dad was vice principal in high school. I would pay good money today to smell again that dusty computer lab room filled with good'ol 386 and mario sounds.

> Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young

How come I'm never able to identify where it's coming from?

I'd make a candle out of it if I ever found it

Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I'd probably only sell one

It'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose

Same clothes, homegrown, a stone's throw from a creek we used to roam

But it would remind us of when nothing really mattered

Out of student loans and tree house homes, we all would take the latter

There's some kid today who will experience future nostalgia from opening an Alibaba package.

How about the smell of a dying C64 power supply? Anyone else?

As well as teen spirit and napalm

My brand new economics textbook in college smelled like vomit. I since noticed other new textbooks now and then with the same smell.

Do you think it might be psychosomatic? The quality of many textbooks' content would be sufficient to evoke the odour of vomit, I tender...

I expected a comment comparing the smell to the content, but it really did smell like vomit, from the moment I opened it. I kept my other textbooks, but sold that one as soon as the semester ended. Didn't need it stinking up my bookshelf!

I'm sure it was the VOC's in the glue.

Oxford UP textbooks always smelled like this, Atkins in particular

I know; sorry, I couldn't resist :D

In all seriousness though, there is a lot about textbook publishing that is inexplicably different from other non-fiction books. For instance:

- Why not use the conventional paperback size if the textbook is not reliant on large diagrams? Why do textbooks always have to be massive?

- Why are there so many 'infoboxes' and 'did you knows' and 'warnings' (a characteristic that textbooks share with do-it-yourself and self-help books)?

- Why do almost all textbooks start with lengthy 'How to Use This Book' chapters? If you're in a course, you should have already been told, and most of those seem pretty common-sense anyway.

My favourite business textbooks that mostly avoid these disadvantages (as I see them):

- Managing without Profit, Mike Hudson: an almost complete guide to the mechanics of non-profit organisations; perfect if you already have a good grasp of for-profit business fundamentals.

- A Manager's Guide to Self-Development, Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell: mostly tests in the same vein as Myers-Briggs, explaining various aspects of personality, behaviour and strategy.

- Interpersonal Skills at Work, Maureen Guirdham (not the John Hayes book of the same name!): very academic look at the social dynamics of workplaces, with proper citations to actual studies for further reading; very thought-provoking and genuinely useful if applied carefully.

> For instance:

Those weren't in any of my Caltech textbooks.

You clearly had good textbooks - or is more that your textbooks were American? All the textbooks I have had owned have been British ones, and since curriculums usually differ across countries or even institutions maybe there is no overlap between the publishers operating in the USA and UK?

Butyric acid is a highly unappealing compound characteristic of vomit. Cellulose acetate butyrate is used in inks and coatings and can decompose to butyric acid. Maybe how it happened

The explanation I was looking for!

huh, TIL. I've also had books that smelled like vomit, though I forgot about that altogether until this comment chain. Thanks!

There was an attempt to standardise scented content back in the '80s, but it didn't stick. The root cause of market failure was consumers deterred by a format war between the compressed odour format, Nosepeg, and the higher fidelity (but patent-encumbered) WIF

But the real failure was the always-bad-smelling PNGent. Not sure why they thought that would have worked at all.

Bitmac-and-cheese smelled delicious.

The smell of my first IBM ThinkPad was quite strong. Today that smell triggers good memories of playing old video games or building my first website. I still keep that laptop only to occasionally smell it.

Apple trackpads have a certain smell and I don't exactly know how to describe it, but it's similar to Scotch tape. I really like that smell. More things should smell good like that.

I know it was just a quote in a show but I can call to mind the electricy smell that old computer labs had and it puts me at peace

I remember advertisements for iSmell:

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

I guess it never caught on (maybe the name :/). Following the first link it sounds like there are a few more that have tried something similar.

Then there’s the scene in the beginning of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad Love Story where the protagonist is reading a book on an airplane and the young woman next to him complains about the smell.

I have some Radio Shack solder that I bought in the mid 1970s. It smells /wonderful/ and takes me back to building kits when I was a teen.

It it’s that old, it probably has lots of lead in it, and you probably shouldn’t use it.

Eh, leaded solder is just fine with some basic precautions (and still indicated for military and space ratings) but the smell is probably a highly reactive core flux (rosin) that will eat away at anything it's used on and needs to be vigorously cleaned off after soldering. It may also be a sensitizing allergen so maybe kabdib shouldn't use it, at least not without an extractor.

If you're doing more than the once a year small project you should have fume extraction, occupational (or hobby-based) asthma sucks. As does metal flu (zinc for welding and tin for soldering although I expect that's rarer).

Does each book smell different, evoking associated memories; or do they have the same smell, evoking a non-specific feeling?

The smell of new plastic of new components used to be exciting, now it smells different, typically like nothing.

you can replace smell with audio/music and other sensations. or one could manually add specific smells when studying certain topics. books are great, but they can't fill many usecases computers can

There is new-Mac smell though…

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