Greetings, fellow old people.

RetroTechie 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Greetings, fellow old people.

Greetings back! The only drawback is that (statistically speaking) remaining lifespan is shorter for a 'greybeard' than a youngster.

Apart from that, I feel lucky to have experienced in my life the introduction of: b/w -> color TV, walkmans, home/personal computers, networks/BBSes, floppy/hard drives, CD/DVD/BR, LAN parties, 3D gaming, internet, mp3 players, mobile phones, smartphones, cheapo+powerful compute hw like Raspberry Pi family, and now AI. Not to mention enormous advances in science (especially medical), materials technology & general wealth. I could go on but you get the picture. We truly are living in an age of marvels.

My dad's day job (so 1 gen back) mostly involved paperwork & manually calculating numbers on a calculator. Public libraries did housekeeping on paper cards (see a previous submission of mine), and did so for generations. A century+ ago most people spent their days in agriculture & living under desperately poor conditions.

No doubt today's youngsters will see many advances of their own. But they won't eg. appreciate what cheap cpu's can do, as they haven't witnessed a time those didn't exist. Smartphones & co have been around them since birth.

Greybeards among us are lucky to have the perspective of experiencing that 'tech-hockeystick-curve' of the past ~50y or so.

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gtk40 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Funny enough, I'm only in my early 30s and grew up with the Commodore 64. It was the basement computer that I could do whatever I wanted to, whereas the Windows computer (initially 3.1 and got upgraded all the way to 98) computer upstairs had to be shared and had more supervision. So I enjoyed writing a lot of code and trying things. I managed to have quite a collection of software and accessories just by asking around who still had stuff in the late 90s and early 00s in their basement for an 80s computer, and more did than you would expect.

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mkovach 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We are not old. We've just typed more words than Stephen King and probably written scarier stories in a single sprint.

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layer8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder what today’s youngster hackers will reminisce over in 44 years.

	▲	tsm 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I still think that I'm young, but I currently reminisce about doing real work without an always-on internet connection (and using saved-to-disk HTML documentation, physical books, etc.), and I am looking forward to reminiscing about writing thousands of lines of code, debugging tricky issues, etcetera with my own fingers and brain instead of outsourcing to an LLM.
	▲	poisonborz 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That they still had some sort of control
	▲	thm 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Talking predominantly to humans on a web forum.
	▲	wateralien 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is a great question

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boltzmann-brain 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

my first internet was on a commodore, on a C128, with a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. we got insane speeds! seconds per character!

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reaperducer 4 hours ago | parent [-]

a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country.

Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity.

People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-inch monitor isn't OLED. We would hack mainframes on the other side of the planet with a 40x7 character unlit LCD, and no internet.

	▲	IAmBroom 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dade Murphy, is that you? Did you and Angelina Jolie really get it on?

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tech_army 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hello hello Age is just a number lol