Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree that the experience is like today's Apples, but do agree that the Raspberry Pi tried and somewhat succeeded capturing that spirit. In my view; it was absolutely glorious and completely magical. Keep in mind I was a kid when I started. My first english words were words like "PRINT" and "GOTO". The machine came with restrictions that did not appear as such back then. It booted immediately into a programming language. It had games but also you could program it (which in itself is like a game). You had to figure it out yourself. Either by somehow acquiring books or by trial and error. No Google. To exchange software we put ads in the paper and random people of all ages would come to our house (or I'd go to them). It didn't look weird back then. We used tapes and later floppies. They were terrible at keeping the data in a stable way but it worked. Hard drives and modems were a dream. Rich people had those. Graphics were beautiful. Especially on the Amiga. The PC kids used to come and crumble from the weight of jealousy looking at my graphics or making MOD music on Modtracker.

I suppose a lot of this was true for the early PC days as well. Just with inferior graphics and interfaces.

After I sold my Amiga to get driving lessons I brought home an ancient 286 and made a text-adventure on it using TADs. The magic wasn't excluded from the PC world, it was just less colourful.

Damn, that sounds wonderful. It sounds like I really missed out there, but I AM very grateful I did get to experience the early magic of the internet at least, that I remember really well. My "hardware" experience wasn't quite like you described at all because we had no money, and it was a junk computer, where basically the only thing I could do was draw things in MS Paint. I see sort of the energy you are talking about though ... and I envision that would have been truly awesome. If what you are talking about is a 10, and today is a 0, my hope is that I at least got to experience a 7

I had my VIC20 as a hand me down from an auntie who came to visit from Paris. All the manuals were in French, not that English would have helped me at the time. C64 was king back then so I only had 1 game on a tape, and later another my friend found at a bargain bin and nicked it for me (still have those). So the only thing I could do is learn how to program. Having a computer that is old and "useless" for the times, is actually a benefit. I'm sure it has a lot to do with what you do now. I think you most definitely experienced what I did, just on a different platform.

I do remember a funny memory where some time later I found an old laptop in the trash. It was black and white, I have no idea what it was.

I think it looked something like this, but even older looking than this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/IB...

and it had nothing on it except a PDF reader or something, so I would pretend to write important documents and turn it on and off many times throughout the day because I couldn't really do much else with it, and I was running on fumes as far as using my imagination as there was literally -nothing- on it.

And yes, had a huge part of who I am today

By the way, you could get on ebay and pick up any of those 80s computers and see what you can do with that now... I recommend an Amiga 500 :-)

Emulation is a whole lot easier to get started with TBH and you could run the emulator on something like a Raspberry Pi 400 if you wished to preserve some "home computer" feel. Dealing with real hardware from the 1980s is not for beginners, and the machines are only getting flakier and more expensive over time.

No doubt. I have a Pi400 running an Amiga emulation and another running mame. They are great. But they are not magic, and they cannot capture the essence like the real deal.

The MiSTer, on the other hand, is sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, and it captures a lot more of that essence.

The books that came with the C64 were pretty decent and could take you a pretty long way. Once I got a modem, the world really opened up. We traded software via BBSes and had monthly meetups at a local library where someone would rent out a conference room and everyone would bring their C64 rigs and meet and greet (and copy software).

I agree, Apple is nothing like it. Apple is the opposite because you don't need to know anything about how it works to use one, but that's their niche. With the Commodores, you boot up to a Microsoft BASIC prompt and crack open the manual.

What I would have done for a modem in those days...

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