Hacker News Reader

Comment by Exuma | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com