Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before

>Meanwhile, the internet in those days was small and populated mostly by smart and interesting people gathered in small-to-medium sized phpBB servers.

The hurdle to get online kept a lot of people offline.

The hurdle to get online and post is so, so low nowadays that most of the Internet is just garbage.

I'm not saying there aren't gems out there. Just that "bad" has gotten more prevalent because creating has become so easy.

>The modern internet feels so genuinely terrible

The enshitification is real, but I would attribute that to being hijacked by advertising platforms.

Social media algorithms are literally derived from algorithms for showing relevant ads, and as a result you must be "identified" anywhere you go.

Two easy solutions for a better experience:

1. Don't use any sites that use algorithms exclusively (e.g. no Facebook, use Youtube subscriptions rather than the front page, etc.) 2. Don't use sites that require you to login unless there is clear value in doing that (e.g. you can browse Reddit without logging in if you don't intend to comment, etc.)

We remember the good and forget the negatives. Like waiting 5 minutes for a 500k image to load, trying to configure jumpers on a sound card, or waiting multiple minutes to load a game (or the next level in a game...)

The joys of today are just different from when I was a kid. I can bemoan that games can't truly have secrets and lore any more, which is true. But my son can craft an entire world in Minecraft and have his friends play in it while they chat and he can craft his own secrets and experiences for his friends.

He focuses on the fun he can have today and cares not at all about the fun that existed before him.

I got a hand me down copy of Flash 5 around 2003 and i absolutely adored it. Didn't actually learn much programming (i was 9 years old) but the ease of animation and wiring up buttons was absolutely enchanting.

Personally, though, i don't really have a golden age. I love retro computing, it's how I spend a terrible amount of my time, and most of it i spend thinking, "thank god we don't live like this anymore" lmao.

The Internet specifically, though, was more fun in the pre-Facebook/Twitter/Instagram world, absolutely no question there.

A great many things have been declining over the decades, and it actually goes back much further.

I've been looking into this for quite some time now. It starts with a generational attack on children through their education to indoctrinate and induce maladaptive behavior that they will carry forward their entire lives.

Centralized systems are inherently prone to infection and contagion by malevolent interests. One worm and the world dies.

The outcomes we see today are the result of dynamics caused by a whipsaw in time, where everything is collapsing, and control is the only thing that can stop it.

Although that is flawed reasoning because you can't stop certain chaotic events. Most hysteresis problems involving such show believing that you can stop those is true is quite absurd without perfect future sight which is impossible.

The pivotal point was late 1970s, through fiat money educational material was updated, and teachers reeducated to a more modern principle of education. In reality, what they mean by this is the use of torture in the classroom.

The elements, structure, and clustering that make up that label definitionally can be found in books such as Joost Meerloo, or Robert Lifton on the subject matter (1950s).

As chaos grew, control was claimed as the solution, and this included control of information and practice on dependencies which are now no longer common knowledge.

Going back to education, the pedagogy is often known to a layperson as teaching by rote, but few have a rigorous definition of that. The structure follows what teachers and administrators now openly call today "Lying to Children".

Following this strategy, at the start of education you are given a fundamentally flawed and useless model, to teach abstract concepts. That model in progressive steps thereafter (in subsequent sections) requires you to unlearn, and relearn various parts of it becoming only slightly more useful with each step. In the process you are exposed to the structures inherent in torture at a time where you cannot differentiate truth from lie biologically. Creativity, and true understanding are stamped out, and the educated are viewed as the beacons of intelligence.

Asking questions not being directly taught is rewarded with frustration, and PTSD is not uncommon in the victim. This began and coincided with the boomer generation entering roles in education fresh out of college.

These vulnerable states often allow temporarily distorted thought to be permanent in the very young.

Prior to that time, people were taught following greek curricula in rational thought/method/rationalism (Greeks, Descartes, Kant, etc). The general process being one where you start with a working system, you reduce that system to first principles that are known true, and then go about building a model from that to predict future events in such systems. This in engineering is known as reducing to practice.

You'll notice the former structure, which is used in conjunction with several other strategies to gatekeep knowledge behind math, is almost the proverbial opposite of the latter. Inherent in rote pedagogy is that it allows and follows elements of gnosticism, which is also refuted and generally considered evil. That consensus hasn't stopped this structure from being used.

Torture fundamentally breaks people, and it has become common practice for teachers to torture the children in a way that most people without knowledge of such things would never recognize, the teachers themselves included.

In blaming the failures on the student when its been orchestrated as a matter of structure in too many ways to relate in a small post like this, they torture the student.

Go to any 2nd hand book store, compare the textbooks published after 1978 or newer with those that are older. You'll see the difference. Why has no one noticed?

That is simple. Older books are and have been for at least the last 20 years, being destroyed through a sophisticated silent system reminiscent of Orwells 1984.

Libraries budgets are tied to active circulated titles. Anything low circulation is donated to private 3rd-parties who decide what is objectionable (memory hole), and what is not (a Goodwill book to be resold). Anything that doesn't sell above market value is eventually memory holed.

Incidentally, the issues continued to spread as the boomer generation received the torch of political power in the 90s. They still hold majority of political power today, having failed to pass the torch in 2010. They have been following the classic caricature of "dead men ruling" as described by Thomas Paine in the Rights of Man. People feared that all it would take is 1 bad generation, and history is proving this true.

If the average person of a people is incapable of rational thought, its just a matter of time before they go extinct.

There are subcultures that are permanently so, and there are subcultures that come out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Home Computing (and the BBS networks, and Usenet, and AOL and Compuserve, et. al.) were a "hobby" that merely mimicked government and corporate use of Big Iron, and they mimicked and updated predecessor social networks, and as such, Home Computing was eventually destined to marry with Big Iron and they met in the middle, penetrating the Consumer Market with devices.

It was up to computer hobbyists to refine that consumer appeal. Computer hobbyists could often be men who used computers at work, enjoyed it kinda, or just took their work home with them. My father built a Heathkit component stereo for our home, and it was a full-fledged higher-than-consumer-quality system. While he did not build computers like his son built computers, it was his contact with electronics and gadgets at work that primed him for that ease of use, and his enthusiast's hobbies such as DXing the radio waves. And learning from him, I first learned about computers and electronics at home, and then at school, and I ultimately parlayed it all into a series of jobs in I.T. and Cybersecurity.

I was also a member of the Goth subculture. Now there's something that occasionally lends to the mainstream (who doesn't like "Nightmare Before Christmas"?) but mainstream kids won't all go Goth because Goth is just one choice among many, and it's usually rebellious and dark, and there are other kids with other tastes. And Goth culture may appeal more to young adults who may grow out of it.

Also, religion can be counter-cultural, or subcultures can form around religious faith and spirituality. And there's plenty of examples. And the plurality of it all means that while Christianity can be mainstream, it's never ubiquitous. Computers and the Internet have the sort of consumer power to make everyone wish that everyone else had them. And so the corporate world will not rest until computers are more ubiquitous and more mainstream than Jesus.

Network speeds are still improving exponentially. There is talk of the Australian National Broadband Network getting an upgrade to either 2.5 Gbps or 10 Gbps! That blows my mind.

I think you may be conflating the openness of the hardware of the time, with languages.

It has actually disappeared. The culture the author grew up with is dead and it’s not coming back.

He says in the article that he felt both like he was on the forefront of technology and that he had control over it. Now being on the forefront of technology means staring right into existential horrors like AI, global warming, predatory consumerism, and the death of privacy. You can’t just go back to pretending 8-bit computers are new and the future is bright.

The author wrote a short piece that was 90% about his feelings; incredible to me how many people in the thread simply ignored that and went right to criticizing technical inaccuracy

Indeed, it's a similar lament to how e.g. nobody makes X like in the good old days of Y (for arbitrary X and Y). Except they do, and there's probably way more of X being made, in more nuance of variation, style and fractal sub-categorisation than ever before.

What has changed are that people and culture moved on: the people who made X back then are now into some new Z bullshit; the local W, that used to be all about X, is long gone; and V, which was how we followed all the latest X, doesn't even X these days. We can have nostalgia for those things, but we can also find equivalents if we put in some effort: some that stick with the traditional, others that are pushing things in new directions, choose your poison. The Internet has made it easier to find things outside of the mainstream; and may actually be less effort to follow than when it was mainstream (e.g. YouTube channels vs a weekly TV broadcast; blogs vs magazines; discussion forums vs quarterly meetups; etc.). Maybe without a mainstream "direction", the future of X isn't clear; but it also means we can choose which way we want to push that envelope.

One thing that does get lost is actually "being mainstream"; e.g. events being huge sell-out affairs; being a topic for casual conversation; etc. Things that require other people to give a shit. Yet that's a two-way street: after all, we don't want those Z idiots trying to push their crap on us!

Another good option is the ESP32. You can get one for less than $10.

I think that’s the author’s problem. Anyone can get one and set it up. And I mean that quite literally. I run home assistant on a raspberry pi. I just imaged an SD card and plugged in a few wires. Home Assistant is another good example because you don’t need to know yaml now.

There are images for everything that make stuff easy to learn without putting in a lot of hard work.

> Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone

What I've noticed(as someone relatively active around retro hardware communities) is that the users sort into demographics with rather conflicting goals:

* I want to run Linux, or CP/M, or a particular version of Basic, or something else with existing software.

* I want to recompile existing C code to the new hardware

* I want to directly control the hardware with the most minimal kinds of OS layer, and probably using assembly, not C.

* The challenges of the hardware are part of my motives for using this platform

* I want to work within a certain retro aesthetic and I don't mind adding more hardware or leaning on other people's code to get there

So in practice, users tend to arrive in waves according to what developments have happened on that platform previously: neo-retro micro designs released in the past few years like X16, Agon, or Neo6502 first attract people doing the essential hardware bringup tasks. Then they settle in to a cycle of incremental porting and toolchain construction. Gradually the platform becomes understood well enough to do some decent applications. The whole while, everything you wanted to do on the device would be accomplished more readily by using a commodity Linux box, but part of the appeal is in having control over the details.

When we use computers to be productive we're usually giving up a lot of the details to software packages and dependencies that are poorly understood by the larger software world and have become the defacto thing everyone uses simply because no equal to them exists. In the time when the retro stuff was actually new, there was a lot of anticipation for those tasks becoming possible someday, but they weren't yet, and that characterized computing as unrealized potential instead of a dull, opaque reality.

> Consumerist convenience, walled gardens, corporate risk-adversity and shallow aesthetical homogenization have replaced the sprawling hobbyist collective that once made up the bulk of personal computers and their users.

They should definitely go to a Chaos Computer Club event like CCC, because the "sprawling hobbyist collective" is still very much alive.

If you want the kind of experience he's waxing lyrical about then go join your nearest hackerspace. Make sure it's an actual hackerspace though and not just a rebranded co-working space.

he actually lists that as one of his main bullet points:

Old gits like yours truly [were] younger back then.

This is such a weird victimhood take.

Small communities do well because they aren't for everyone. That's how like minded people find each other. That's what subcultures are. By definition they aren't for everyone.

You don't have to be offended by everything.