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…
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
Yes and no.
Computers and computer systems weren’t so much enshittified back in those days.
But the bulk CRT screens, I don’t miss those…
By the way, at those times almost every screen had one of those stupid placebo ‘glare filters’ . I don’t miss those either.
Oddly, I want the CRT’s, but those optiplexes are horrible.
I just want one crt per system for retro gaming.
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.
Computers were still exciting. And hadn’t been enshitified.
Yes, computers were fun and exciting. Now they just suck.
Unless Linux. But even then it takes an effort to disable all the bloat and spyware bs in the bios.
what do you mean by bloat and spyware on linux? (asking because it’s the first time i hear this take)
In the bios: it’s the booting software that’s separate from the OS. Most newer computers have ridiculously long menu’s and you have to be careful what you disable because of bit locker nonsense and whatnot.
I can smell this picture
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.
Computer class in high school back then for me was treating them as glorified typewriters. I fooled around with some VBScript as that’s all we had available (I was very fortunate my grade school teacher taught us LOGO) and I managed to script kiddy my way into admin access for the internet filter for my friends so we could play stuff on Newgrounds. My career advisor told me to get a science degree because there was no future in computers, haha.
Computer lab day!
Yeah but not because of the computers.
I see your nostalgia and raise you this:
I see your nostalgia and raise you this: this
I actually had to learn to use a slide rule in high school, in the late 1970s.
thhhick
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.
I remember essentially turning a BASIC prompt into a spinning, geometric rave decoration back in 5th grade, and thinking it was the coolest shit ever, but really… it was all about Math Blaster and The Oregon Trail in the years up to that point, and for several years later.
And yes, I’d go back in a heartbeat.
Despite having 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 🤣
