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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Despite havin a very nostalgic soft spot for my 16-bit and 8-bit home computers, these labs do nothing for me. I worked in so many as an technician at a uni and in various other tech support roles in my 20s that these generic cream boxes leave me kinda cold. Give me an Amiga, an ST or even a ZX Spectrum any day. Probably cos I'm old AF ๐คฃ
I miss youth and the sort of reckless abandon and constant sense of wonder. The easy friendships and stuff. The discovery of learning tech. The tech was cool and new and dramatic but our tech is def cooler now.
Things are pretty cool now too if you look for it. Sure there are problems but there have always been problems. I look for things to trigger my sense of wonder and it still feels amazing. Just harder to find cus I'm more experienced and well traveled or whatever.
I dunno I was a goofball kid working at tech then and I'm a goofball kid in a old body oggling tech now too :D
The tech has evolved a lot. Especially in the FOSS area! And I am thankful for the progress. But along the way, the average culture is what I miss the most. Do I miss the very convoluted, fragile, non-standardized, and hard to configure hardware? Heehee naw.
This image is nostalgic because it recalls when personal computers were conceptually personal, even when they were public. New tech was fun and exciting.
Some of my fondest memories were easy LAN parties and collabing on XP-era machines in my 3D Studio MAX class. Also, computers didn't feel near-useless without an Internet connection.
It's been said before but bears repeating: "The Internet was a place." It didn't follow you everywhere, spy on you, sell you out. You weren't supposed to divulge your whole life to strangers, but somehow you still made new friends.
People logged in to hang out. Heck, know what I miss most? People seemed to have TIME to log in and hang out. Even busy people. These days I feel hurried to smash out a text message while in motion.
People made personal, expressive, whimsical websites for fun, and not just as a hopeful web-dev portfolio. The Internet was only about making money for tie-wearing squares; everyone else just did things for the fun of it.
I think that's what we miss. People were learning and using these miraculous machines that were capable of anything.
Now the machines are consumption-first appliances primarily aimed to drain your wallet and personal information, and the people have gotten so dumb. Computer literacy dropped with all the rest of kinds of literacy, and I long to find a way to push against that tide...
Yes, comprehensible systems? Just enough to be very exciting? Positive energy? My youth? The music?
Uh, yes?
all of those things were beautiful. all long gone now.
Yes, yes, a million times yes!
I can smell this picture
I miss most of all when the internet was the domain of nerds only. Us nerds are nicer than other people on average.
I used to think so too. Turns out a lot of nerds were just one culture-war grievance away from going full Nazi.
Yeah :(
The Internet was for anybody. I think it was a mistake to foist it on everybody.
Or when "bad", a hell of a lot more entertaining, like Archimedes Plutonium for example.
You better believe I was degaussing as many CRTs as I could.
Playing Unreal Tournament and Duke Nuken 3D with everyone else in the lab.
I miss the community of it. As with a lot of things having it at home seems easier and better but so much more lonely.
I miss computer time being something special.
It is special again - when you switch from your phone to the computer :D
Yes. Although, more than the technology or the culture, I probably miss being a kid with a bright future ahead of him...
Rick Rosner had this to say about high school:
High school's attractive to me, not necessarily because you have a good time, but because it's clear why you are miserable.
I would go for a redo if I could. I would know better not to trust the guidance councilors or school therapists. No compromises on the classes I really should have been in.
No.
What I miss a lot more than the hardware was the straightforwardness of coding. In those days we largely just translated process logic into code, we didn't have to cobble together frameworks, packages, libraries and containers. The code itself took more work but we could do it without knowing as much as devs have to know now.
Yes. Websites were dead easy to make. I could fit all my music onto one floppy disk because I saved them as midis. There were no standards for sound or graphics cards so everything played different on different computers. You could access information without needing to sign up because emails were just emerging. You could get an email address with a name you wanted. Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia yet. Autodesk hadn't bought 3ds max yet. Animated gifs. Flying toaster screensavers. In fact, the screensavers had sound! Would give you a great attack if you left your speakers on.
Hell no
Exactly.
Well no, I hated computer class, but I fucking hate modern computers, the modern Internet and AI more.
I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media. And I really miss not watching those low IQ chode's trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.
I too miss the day when the internet was for geeks and nerds, (and anyone who wasn't never left MySpace). Now everyone is online, and the novelty has been ruined. Not to mention how much more centralized the internet is now, compared to 20-30 years ago. Everyone visits the same five websites/apps now.
The barrier to entry was real, I had to figure out how to write a dialup script for my first PC to connect to the internet I purchased from the local high school. I didn't go there, that was just the only place in town with enough internet to resell.
It's good that everyone has access to information now. The impact it's had on visual arts and music really can't be overstated, it allows artists to reach their fans directly which is incredible. But it was a different place when everyones grandma wasn't reading Breitbart and repeating it on social media.
I agree the centralization of everyone on a handful of sites is an issue, it makes it too easy to manipulate and rig. I feel like social media was an incredible mistake but I don't know if we'll ever be able to put that genie back in the bottle.
No
Greatly. Rather, I miss the days where it was easy to unplug.
Yeah, but I'm glad we're not burning electricity on those anymore. Screensavers were fun at the time, but putting the displays to sleep is the better practice.
My thirties? meh
I miss having enough friends that we could have a full 5v5 in CS without needing bots or the server open to the internet. Especislly true of high school, where I had CS and a few other games installed on the network (we had a networking class and our teacher was also the IT manager for the district and the 5 people in the class were given admin access for something and it was never revoked) so literally every PC on the network had access to it and you could be playing a game in any class, any period.
I'll be honest I don't really miss a lab full of win95 shit boxes further crippled by net nanny. It was just a partial escape from the other abuses of middle and high school.
No
As someone who had to maintain school computers I will say with certainty that I don't miss those old ball mice.
