Hacker News Reader

Comment by han1 | Hacker News Reader

Remember the good ol' days when we fully owned and controlled our devices? I want that back!

When was that? When phones used wires?

In the US, wired phones were often leased from the phone company! If you shop for vintage phones from the 1960s, they will often have a decal to that effect. Examples:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/71gAAeSw1URp8QPF/s-l1600.webp

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/tPAAAeSw~RxqBiLR/s-l1600.webp

I think this started to change only in the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to cheaper electronics imported from overseas?

It was because of anti-monopoly legislation, https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/att-breakup-spin... ; i.e. breaking up 'Ma Bell' into the baby bells, and the current oligopoly we have instead in the modern day. An older picture showing how they were broken up and then re-merged: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurelings/comments/r24ed0/diagram... or https://legalclarity.org/what-happened-to-the-baby-bells-aft...

I had no idea people paid by the minute

Yeah, when I was a kid you had to go to the AT&T store to get a phone.

N900 days. Damn I still miss that device :(

I wasn't alive in the 90s, so for me it was 2012-2015. Android was pretty open, iOS was easier to jailbreak, and the ecosystem felt a lot "freer" than today where you step outside of Google or Apple's garden and get endless Cloudflare captchas, apps refuse to load due to attestation, and things are designed without privacy in mind.

In 2008 I've got a Neo Freerunner, a few years later a Nokia N900, then a Librem 5. So at least the last 18 years, I guess? We need to work hard for it to keep going though.

(well, unless we start to bikeshed on the exact meaning of "fully control")

I am far from young, but I fail to see the appeal to this prelapsarian age when we controlled our devices.

In no uncertain ways, when things come to technogy things are so much better. Linux is awesome nowadays, self hosting is cheap and easy to get into, etc.

How exactly are things worse now in regards to controlling your own devices?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com