Remembering Your First Computer Is For Old People | Hacker News Reader

Remembering Your First Computer Is For Old People

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26 pointsprotomyth44 comments

I may be old, but when the apocalypse comes, I know how to assemble a 286 from junk parts, edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and play games in stunning EGA graphics.

Meanwhile my kids will be digging into piles of radioactive junk looking for Lightning adapters.

And even with our super-long life spans, those old PCs will still work 100 years from now long after all the MBPs and iPhones are completely dead. I remember my old IBM XT, it could probably derail a train and still boot up.

I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but even now, some of the EPROMs of that era are exhibiting bit rot. The floppies aren't doing so well either.

I guess I'll have to reserve mine for breaking out of security-glass-walled cells.

I get excited not, because I revel in what it was like. I get excited because everything that was promised in the day I opened that C64 and connected to a BBS via a 2400 baud volksmodem is coming true. I am living my childhood dream, and this is why I always have a smile when I look back at my younger days. It is not reveling in nostalgia, its that everything I dreamed about is coming true, and I am playing a small part in it!

I couldn't have said it better, myself! I do enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but my fondness for computer history is mostly about understanding how to build the future.

As much as I believe an iPad is a true computer that can be used to create and consume, it just isn't the same as the old computers. They weren't as slick as the current post-pc, appliance computers. As someone in one of the old magazines (Creative Computing, Byte, or maybe Antic) said, "computer from the moment you turn them on are instruments of the twilight zone". Everyone can work an iPad, but that blank prompt was pretty intimidating.

Time-wise, I am one of the second generation. I didn't build my own computer, but came before the IBM PC era. My Dad took my brother and I into town and traded our Atari VCS (later called the 2600) and 23 cartridges for an Atari 400, 410 cassette recorded, and two cartridges: Pac-Man and Missile Command. He then bought the Atari BASIC cartridge and an issue of Antic for us. I learned to program and have had a lifelong love of it (younger brother hasn't done bad either).

I would have loved an iPad at that age, but I would have never been a programmer with it. I remember my first car and all the work I did on it too (Buick Rivera with a 455). They weren't appliances.

I'd guess that's because unless you are old enough your first computer could be an Apple II, an Atari, a Commodore, a Sinclair or Beeb, chances are your first computer was not really that memorable ;-)

I remember a lot of the "first" of a thing I owned, including very commonplace things like my first bicycle, my first car, my first TV, my first stereo system, my first apartment away from home, as well as my first computer.

People just like to reminisce. There's nothing unique about computers in this regard.

Out of curiosity, what was your first computer?

Eh, I think nostalgia can strike in many different ways. I never owned any of the "groundbreaking" machines you mentioned. My first computer was a monochrome 12MHz 286 "laptop" with 640k of RAM, a 40MB hard drive, 2 floppy drives, and a 2400 baud modem. I remember when we got a 15" VGA monitor for it.

It may not have been a setup from the "bad old days of computing", but it was mine, and I loved it. I'll always remember it with a smile.

23-odd years later, I realize that the distance between that machine and the 11" MacBook Air I type this on is just... humbling.

Or in other words: computers became less memorable once they became a commodity.

I remember my first computer (a Z80 based VZ-200) and was intimately familiar with its machine code. Since then, my computers have just been boxes for executing the x86 instruction set.

My grandmother lived to be 91 years old and she used to tell stories of horse drawn buggies and the first radio on her block. And how she would go to the house that had the first TV in her neighborhood.

She would tell me these stories while marveling over the crazy stuff I do every day of my life. Pure science fiction to her when she was growing up.

Some day all of what YOU are doing will be that way and people WILL be doing what we consider Science Fiction today.

Enjoy the ride, it won't slow down for any of us!

"Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.” - Alan Kay

I find this quote to be surprisingly true. It boggles the mind to think that mundane stuff such as sewing machines once was high technology, but there you go. My grandmother still remembers the marvel the day she got her first sewing machine.

A sewing machine is a mechanical marvel. Take one apart sometime, and look at the genius that went into its design.

I have my great aunts' sewing machine that is powered by a treadle and a flywheel. It still works perfectly.

I'm not actually sure I agree with her hypothesis. I remember devices because they were important to me, not because I was the only cool kid on the block with a C64.

If anything, it seems that devices are getting _more_ important and more personal. I'd rather get my wallet stolen than my phone.

I'm going be contrarian here and suggest that this is going to come back into fashion (at least for hackers).

What the author says is true, for a lot of 'old' people their memory of their first computer is intimately linked with the notion that "nobody but me and maybe a handful of my friends had one." I was in a computer club in Las Vegas growing up and there is a picture of me and the Digital Group Z80 based computer I built in the newspaper, I was called out as the youngest person in Nevada who had 'built their own computer.'[1] But really it was the that "computers" were these things you couldn't easily get too and here I had one of my very own. That was awe inspiring.

We've gone through an amazing period of growth, and during that time seen a tremendous amount of change in what folks think of as a 'personal computer.' and starting around the turn of the century things started changing. People got computers who could care less that they were computers, they needed them as tools to get something done, whether it was computing the variance p on a set of measurements, or balancing the books of a corporation, or putting together a flyer for the next newspaper insert. For these folks, who grossly outnumber the 'techno' folks, the fact that all this 'computerness' was exposed made problems for them. I clearly remember a friend of my Dad's who bellowed "I don't need a god damn computer science degree to draw, I've been doing that since was was six!"

That level of pain has made 'ease of use' and 'appliance' salable features of devices which use computation and software to help folks do their jobs. The finally flipped completely over in the 'smartphone' which we all know is a computer but for millions it is a phone first, a camera second, maybe a pager third. There are people with an iPhone or Android phone in their pocket and will tell you with a straight face "I don't own a computer, I get everything I need done with my phone."

Hold on to that thought, they don't own a 'computer.' The thing they have lets them access stuff like the web and call people and take pictures, it isn't that thing you write programs for.

Now that seems like a game of semantics, and initially it really was indistinguishable from such a game, but the fact that 'computerness' was such a non-issue to these people that it becomes something that can be removed, and if it saves money to remove it, it gets removed with extreme prejudice. I expect my kids will have a 'phone' for carrying around and a 'tablet' for composing emails and stuff and they won't have a 'computer.' And that brings us around full circle.

So their kids will have a strong association with the first technology device they got which let them change the way it worked in anyway they wanted, it was a 'computer', not your padd or TV or web viewer thing, this thing you could design programs for and it ran them, what ever you thought up, bam you could make it happen. And the cycle will continue. As they get older they will tell stories about the first computer they got and bore the crap out of people who have been printing circuits on their 3D printers or what not.

[1] This wasn't true, I was the youngest member of the club but there were other kids in Nevada who had built computers by the summer of 1978.

(Old guy story ahead)

The interesting thing is how subtly middle-age and old-age catches up on you. I remember watching some kid ask a 90-year-old what it felt like to be old. He said, "It feels just like it damned always has. I'm only old on the outside"

I didn't understand that at the time.

I used to joke about TV shows as part of helping people out with learning programming and technology management. One day I'm in a room teaching something and I say "That's about as likely as Gilligan and the rest of them actually making it off that island"

Total silence. Nobody in the room knew what "Gilligan's Island" was.

That happening more and more over a few years' time, and finally I decided that I don't tell jokes based on TV shows anymore. For one, most of my frame of reference is in the 80s. For another, I don't waste my time with that much network TV. I don't think it has the cultural significance it used to have.

But there was never a bright line when it happened. I don't wake up one day and somehow realized I'm a middle-aged person. Life feels just like it damned always has.

Well I can relate. I really don't want to, because I am only 25.

But it is properly also related to the issue that there is no longer a big unifying cultural narative. There is no one mister news (i.e Walter Cronkite), you can get your news from a dozen or so places (and not one of them is fair or balanced) and your tv (if you haven't cut your cable yet) is likely to have 200+ channels.

In other words, there is going to be a lot of cult shows but unlikely to be that many shows with a massively broad appeal (like Seinfeld, which some say is one of the last shows watched by everybody).

I'm 35. Until I was about 33/34 I felt like I was in my early-twenties.

I know to some that's still young, to others that's over a decade away, but over the course of this year I think I have crossed over a bright white line as you put it (although not the middle aged one I hope).

That's not to say I feel worse, just different. Where I once felt invincible, I now feel experienced or where I once had endless energy to throw at something I now have the nous to work out a way of doing it with less energy.

I'm slightly younger than you. I think there's a certain point in adulthood when you realize that you are just like all those old people who came before you.

You realize that your parents, perhaps in late middle age and hopefully in good health, still just think of themselves as adult people, not that much different than you probably think of themselves. But, they're "old", you think. And then your brain finally makes the leap and realizes you're getting old -- because everyone is getting old -- and that in a few decades, you'll be old and eventually dead too.

It's not a bad thing really -- certainly it makes it easier to put aside many of the trivial hangups and foolishness of youth, but I think it brings with it a certain sense of urgency.

I'm 43, single, no kids and did feel young until last December when both parents in their 70s became sick. Mom diagnosed as diabetic Dad with IPF (incurable lung disease, among other blue collar stuff).

Now I feel old. Nothing makes you feel old like realizing there is a definite point in time when your way of life will change, significantly.

I'm in the forever alone club but thought one day I'd meet a girl, no luck yet. I wanted to have kids and have my parents be grandparents since I never knew my Dad's father since he died at age 56. At most my parents have maybe ten years but their health is rapidly declining which is a shock.

Anyway at some point there will be some event that makes you go from feeling like 20 to feeling like 50.

It makes you give up Red Bull, stop eating crap and exercise but that's nothing like being healthy all your life, a last minute rush just won't do it.

We all grew up with older people making references from earlier decades that we didn't understand.

That's how we learn pop cultural history. I wasn't alive when Wolfman Jack or Alan Freed were famous DJs, but I know about them because older people talked about them. I wasn't around for Jack Benny, or Jack Paar, or Milton Berle, or Henny Youngman, but I get it when people use them as references because I heard their names, and I asked who they were.

Don't be afraid to make references that people don't get. That's how people find things out, and that's how generations connect. As David Mitchell says, "I first came across Proust via Monty Python, and Wagner via Bugs Bunny."

Go ahead and say things people don't get. It'll give them something fun to look up.

LOL.. My last name is "Bunch".. I have six kids, three girls and three boys..

I doubt most of this crowd would know what show I'm alluding to.. I gave up years ago making the reference in younger crowds!

Wasn't some famous gun legislation named after that family? And a followup question: does wife Carol have a sister?

I remember programming a TRS-80 Model I with 4k of memory and thinking I'd never write a program to fill "All that memory".

Soon after the owner of the computer (My High School Physics teacher) coughed up money to upgrade it to 16k. Then I was convinced this is it.. I'll never use all that memory.

Today I was working on a program that will service BILLIONS of transactions per day and 100,000's of queries per second and consume terrabytes of memory across many machines..

What a difference a couple years makes! :-)

"I’m not one of those “old people.” After all, it’s not like I remember punch cards."

Well, my first programs were on punch cards!

My first computer was a Digicomp 1.

This is true, but the same applies to any technology. I grew up taking central heating, TV and electric lighting completely for granted, but a few decades prior to that those were wonder inspiring inventions and people would have recounted tales about their first television set or the first time they had light bulbs installed. Mass electrification didn't really arrive until the middle of the 20th century.

I remember visiting a relative that did not have an indoor toilet. It was a tad of an eye opener and quite cold.

I even had a typewriter[1], but I was a quite old-fashioned kid.

[1] Typewriter: combination of a thick keyboard and a printer without cable (but no bluetooth also). In order to print a letter you had to press a key. For every single letter! The best part was that I never had to charge the battery. The lack of copy & paste was a bit annoying though.

Jobs may have built the best designed computers but if it was only up to Steve and his way, the world would not have adopted the desktop computers as they did with IBM clones.

It was 286/486's with Windows95 which made common people adopt desktop computers and plethora of commonly available software which were easily installable.

My first computer was a Powerbook 100 in 1992. Apple had authorized a firesale on them, because they couldn't move them. I paid $700 for the base model with 2MB of RAM, a 20MB hard drive, and a SCSI external floppy drive.

It was shortly thereafter that I bought my first computer book, a Hypercard book by Danny Goodman.

My first computer was a Brainiac kit. My next ones were an IBM 7094 and a Bendix G15. And I still remember keypunching 1401 machine language in my first computer job. And now I'm studying neural networks and Scala: what a trip.

"I’m not one of those “old people.” After all, it’s not like I remember punch cards."

Ha, that's nothing. Some people remember their first transistor radio.

Instead of a heavy valve box plugged into the mains, you'd have this small battery powered case proudly sporting a label saying "6 transistors" (in emulation of the mechanical watches that stated "17 rubies").

Amazing stuff. Except that back then it was harder to leave comments on the tweets/blog posts, of course.

Also pretty insightful of Marshall McLuhan to observe, around that time, that we were building up an external, electrical, nervous system.

A macintosh that could dual boot into windows 95. High tech.

.. Just like provoking headlines are for the immature? :)

I really hope she's right. There is almost no conversation as boring as a group of nerds going around in a circle trying to out-do each other on who was the first to do such-and-such:

Well, my first computer was a 486 with only 1MB of RAM

Oh yeah? Mine was a 286 and it didn't even have a 3.5" drive!

Oh yeah? Mine was a TRS-80...

...and so on it goes...

Nerds will always have conversations that are boring to normal people. That's why they are called nerds.

What I'm actually starting to love (or already do?) is that nerdiness is slowly but surely becoming the norm. Soon, there will be little to no distinction, or at least it won't be at all like it was when I was a kid.

I'm sure kids will still separate themselves into their own cliques like they always have, but each clique is being redefined as a result of new technological standards. It's an interesting phenomenon.

I'm a nerd through and through and I find this conversation boring every time it comes up.

Exactly my point. I'm as nerdy as they come, but this conversation never leads anywhere interesting.

it's clearly not boring to them, or they wouldn't be having it!

TRS-80 Color Computer 2, represent.

I agree. They should stick to more interesting topics like their fantasy foosball leagues, how they got sooo wasted on saturday night, whether victor or marcia is going to win survivor 29, or how they hit elite level 9 in gears of duty: tango alpha banana last night.

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