5d ago

Anyone here old enough to miss 1980's computer days?

It was so fun back then. Not the yelling and moaning we have going on today.

Here on Lemmy, even in non-political discussions some is always whining about the current president or whatever.

Or calling for alt voices to be banned.

Back in the 80's computer stuff and conversation was more fun and not so freakin' political.

It was about games, DYI, trying to learn to hack, learning the new tech. It was awesome!

I was part of it, but not as much as I could have been because I was in a small town and couldn't afford a lot. But I def had a foot in the scene, and it was awesome!

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32 comments

I'm not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.
Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.
And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you're right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the "right" computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.
(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it's still pretty great.)
Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don't know if that's just physics being a pain or if it's straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.
Anyway I'll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.
- Yeah, the tech we have is nicer, slicker, and faster. Most just works until it doesn't, then buy another. But I keep feeling like I SHOULD be excited, but I'm not.
  I legit and thinking of dialing it all back, going old school and just fucking around w an old computer that can hardly do anything cool.
  I mean, that excitement almost came back with raspberry pi, but not it's pretty commercial. AI sort had that thrill, but now it's so good and so fast, the newness wore off.
  I recently retired (early retirement), and thought what all my free time I was gonna do and learn all the latest tech. Um, no. Now I want to do old tech as the hobby. lmao
  
  I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.
  I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.
  Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There's also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.
  It's not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it's still reasonable if you have an era you're after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don't, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.
  ....stop looking at me like that.
  There's also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that's a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian's Digital Basement, Necroware)
  
  Yeah, I can definitely see myself going down the same path as you. lol
- Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don’t know if that’s just physics being a pain or if it’s straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.
  Silver lining: it makes personal computers a lot less-expensive. Your system isn't running at a quarter the speed of current systems and in need of replacement three years after it came out of the factory.
  On the video cards...parallel processing is actually still improving at a fair clip -- like, the GPUs aren't improving quite as fast as the CPUs were back then, but they are improving. I think that a major factor is that today, a big chunk of marketshare shifted from desktops to laptops and then laptops to smartphones. That means that while, yes, you can go out and get a tower that can crunch a lot of data in parallel, most software out there isn't going to use it, because a lot of people are using systems that are under power-usage constraints.

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