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Comment by ulkesh | Hacker News Reader

Articles like this always make me feel like I missed out on all the geek going on in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Of course I was a toddler when Xerox PARC was demonstrating their UI to Steve Jobs, and was in middle school when Linus was posting about his "(free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

So as I enter mid-life, I realize just how much I missed either not being old enough, not paying attention enough, or not having the means to get in the game. These stories of tech history, if nothing else, provide motivation for those, like myself, to get into the game and work on something useful -- and most of all something fun.

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Better to ask what you can be part of now than worrying about what you missed.

The shape of computing has changed a bit since then but there's still a lot of very interesting work now and going forward.

But I totally get it... I've felt that way before about tech and music. In the case of music I spent so many years only paying attention to rock from the 70's, 80's and 90's and telling myself music was dead now, but it is not... it's just different and needs to be discovered.

Before that time you needed very big iron to do much at all, so unless you were in the right place, as well as the right time, it was hard to participate.

I began on 8-bit micros (assemler...an assembler woulda been a luxury to us...we typed in machine code and calculated negative offsets in us heads..+) and also a PDP-11/45 running V7 when I was in middle school. My perception is that prior to the 11/45, 11/70 generation I would have had to have been very lucky to have a usable computer to program. Having said that, I remember learning Pascal over one summer holiday when I was a kid, but I had no computer capable of running a Pascal compiler until a couple of years later.

+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE

Well, I would have been in 4th grade when Linux was posting about his free operating system, and we had an XT at home. My sister went to college in '93, so we gave her our old computer and got a brand-new 486/33. In 93 I was BBSing; 94 had a shell account, 95 had Linus' "hobby" installed on the family PC.. So I guess that was 8th/9th grade.

But I, too, often feel I "missed out". I guess it's part of the human condition :)

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