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Comment by kw3b | Hacker News Reader

I started out in the BBS and demoscene of the 90s. The glory days of computing in my opinion, because of the technical innovation (people were making magic with 7mhz processors) and how the community arranged itself. e.g, some ANSI artists in the artpack scene went on to become legit artists, but nobody was sitting around grinding ANSIs to make millions or raise capital. I think about that era in my own open source work today, I just work on what I enjoy and find interesting and whatever happens happens as long as I can pay the bills.

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I was a former (minor) member of groups like ACiD, iCE, CIA (though I never released with them).

The cross-pollination between the hackers / college coders / warez pirates / digital artists was real. A lot of big company CEOs got their start in those days.

It was mostly just about exploring and connection, and as the BBS scene faded to irc chats (efnet, freenode, etc), that whole mixed-scene kept growing for quite awhile.

Now everything is for sale.

Nice, I was in ACiD's orbit too, my BBS was a TOXiC Net affiliate before the scene wound down.

That's the thing I miss the most about the scene, the cross-pollination. You'd distro a pack and learn something about a whole other scene, or help somebody mod their board and they'd become co-sysop of yours. That whole era is definitely why I wound up becoming a programmer.

You'd probably love this latest Razor1911 prod, if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtu.be/dybkLM-1eQo

Thank you for this. I grew up outside the scene but it is so encouraging to see things like this celebrated.

This is awesome as hell, haven't seen that one yet. I love that cracktros/demos are still a thing. A cracktro a day keeps the slop away.

If you like that one, you'd probably dig this. I feel like this is one of the best demos of all time from both a technical point of view plus storytelling. Dropped back in 2019. Warms my heart.

The Black Lotus - Eon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc

I wasn't alive in the 90s, and barely was in the 00s. I look at others writings about those early days, and compare it to today, then get a weird feeling of wanting to experience the "good ol' days" before python scripts made in 10 minutes by an AI and sold to investors as "vendor lock-in" was the thing to strive for.

Fwiw I assume most people feel this way.

I am a 90s kid and I watch things like Stranger Things and feel nostalgia for a simpler time even though I wasn't even alive in the 80s.

Fwiw, that's just commercially packaged nostalgia which is mostly the good (and often materialistic) part and forgets absolutely of the rest.

Our brains do that to us and I find it positive to have a nice fantasy world to escape to but definitely not to be mixed up with the reality of things.

OTOH being able to ride off into the bush with your mates and build tree houses and whatever and "be home when the street lights come on", have no phone, &c. was very different to the world we brought our kids up in.

That's true but it doesn't have to be different. I know that in some countries (e.g. US) that's not often possible due to enforcement but that's not the case in other regions.

So, if you can, be the change you want to see in the world. Although videogames and screens are a big culprit too, in my opinion.

Yeah same, I'm older than you and I still yearn for the unix glory days of the 90's and early 2000's, when even Microsoft was just Micro$oft and not Microslop. I remember XP, for all its faults, was still a better experience than anything they put out and it had real charm as well.

I think in general things in computing were better when the nerds were still running the show. One the MBAs and bean counters got involved it's all gone downhill. Feels like the golden age of computers and the internet are well behind us at this point.

That was kind of always there too in some form. Countless people made countless bank on the jankiest vb6 apps.

The one thing I take away from those early days is that we didn't really care what most people were doing. We figured most people were lamers, so whatever most people were doing was probably lame by definition. I guess if you want to kind of approximate the good ol' days, I'd ignore what most people are doing, work on what you want to work on, and if you think it's cool try to join or build a community around that.

The AI grindslop today is infuriating but I mostly ignore it and do my own open source thing. I quit my job last year to work on open source full time because I felt like I had no choice, there was a project in my mind I'd go down with the ship with. If I wind up in the permanent underclass because it fails, 90s me would think not selling out was pretty l33t.

What are you making?

Don't worry, the future will be worse and you'll be nostalgic for the good ol' 20s.

I was there.

It's mostly rose tinted glasses.

There were some amazing feats. But it was slow and frustrating. Like you wouldn't believe how long things took.

In the 90s most technical documentation was in actual physical books. If you wanted to learn something you had to order and buy the book (and Amazon wasn't a thing everywhere!), and it would take weeks or months to arrive. Or you did inter-library loans (which were amazing but also took weeks).

Or you relied on magazines which had a publication cycle. Writing actual physical letters about a program that was written out in the magazine was a thing.

When I got internet access in the mid-90s I remember emailing someone to ask about mirrors of their documentation project because I didn't want to use up their bandwidth.

I'd never ever want to go back. Bring on the future!

I was also there. It isn't rose-colored glasses. The tech truly was better back in the 90s and 2000s. Not perfect, certainly, but it was made by people who gave a damn and were trying to actually make good things. It wasn't like today, where most software is slop (not necessarily AI slop, but slop nonetheless) churned out by companies whose decisions are made solely by how much profit they can squeeze out no matter if the quality tanks.

No, we really did lose something along the way.

> It wasn't like today, where most software is slop

Did you ever use Window 3.1? Or any windows software?

Are you forgetting the multiple crashes per day? Or the incessant playing with system.cfg to get MSDOS drivers to work?

And Linux was only better because it didn't do much.

The only hardware damage software has ever caused was some 1994 Linux driver for a Trident video card getting a frequency wrong and frying a monitor.

> churned out by companies whose decisions are made solely by how much profit they can squeeze out no matter if the quality tanks.

As opposed to 1990's Microsoft or IBM?

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