Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

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> this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be

Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15 years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline.

There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was also much more diversity in the computing landscape with different hardware architectures and operating systems. In fact back then DOS machines were some of the least interesting hardware and early Windows (pre 3.x) was just terrible compared to what Acorn, Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Then came the mid-90s and everything had converged into x86 running Windows. I remember at the time feeling rather let down by just how boring and crummy desktop computing had become considering all the interesting things that preceded it. Things picked up again once I discovered BeOS and Linux -- I guess even in the 90s I didn't like Microsoft Windows and to be honest little has changed over the years.

That's just my opinion though. The "golden age" is a very subjective thing that I suspect is largely driven by the age of the observer.

I grew up using Windows XP/Vista and browsing the early days of the interactive web, mostly based on Flash. For me of course that was the golden age, and now we’re stuck with huge walled gardens and invasive adtech…iPhone had come out and it was amazing watching the mobile market rapidly advance. I remember seriously suggesting Windows Phone to my parents…Google Docs totally upended how we did assignments in late elementary school.

I don't think Google Docs was a thing until I was in high school. Still, don't think my schools adopted it quickly. I do have many fond memories of flash games too (and of course, viruses I inadvertently introduced to my parents' computers).

Back when I was learning computers in elementary school, we were taugh to use Yahoo! as our search engine and most of our 'computer' assignments for the day involved drawing butterflies in Microsoft Paint or seeing how many words we could type per minute.

You're definitely right, what each of us individually perceive as "the golden age" is probably driven largely by age and nostalgia.

I think I phrased my initial comment incorrectly - I definitely didn't mean it was the golden age of personal computing, but rather the golden age of the internet.

Certainly, some things have improved. There's been more standardization and a proliferation of knowledge about the 'right' way to design a website (from both a tech and marketing perspective). Back then, there was an excitement and a feeling of freedom I got when browsing the web. Part of it I suppose could just be that I was young and not yet so cynical, but it felt like the wild west to me back then.

Every site looked different, many were ugly and gaudy as hell with bright colors, flashing animations like the Vegas strip, and regularly broken links, but despite this, there was something charming and endearing about it that just isn't present today.

Browsing the internet today is a very contained and sanitized experience. Everything is wrapped in plastic and padded with nerf, and though you may go to different sites, there's a feeling of sameness to it all. Every time I click on something, I'm making someone money. The data I generate while browsing is sold off to the higest bidder. You can assume, like a digital panopticon, the man in the watchtower (NSA, other government alphabet agencies) could be watching you at any given time.

Maybe not all of this is true or framed accurately - browsing the web has definitely become easier and more streamlined and for the average user, that's a good thing. But something's been lost for me - the wild west of the internet has become a guided tour.

I agree. Honestly, I'd take the gaudy animated GIFs and marquee tags back if it meant there was less reliance on Medium / Facebook / etc.

For me the biggest change is the shift from content to consumption. 90s web was generally content first. Today's web is all about lower quality content and force-feeding consumers until they're addicted to it like crack (some massive generalisations there)

It's a well-known fact that the best era of anything was whatever was happening when you were 13 years old, and it's all downhill from there.

I belong to a similar generation and for me actually only Windows and macOS map to the feelings that I enjoyed while using those 16 bit machines and small flirt with BeOS and QNX demo floppies.

For many years I looked forward to GNU/Linux settling into one stack and offering a multimedia experience like the Amiga, Atari and Acorn, but that was in vain in the kingdom of CLI and forking projects.

I'm like you - that the Windows era was a low point in computing for me. I used Workbench 3.1 before, and Linux afterwards, and both of those kindled my interest in computers far more than Win 3.1 - XP ever could. On the otherhand I do have some nostalgia for those Windows days - it wasn't all bad, just a little on the boring side. I remember those themes from Win98 with the associated screensavers fondly. I also posted here about running old versions of microsoft office, and I enjoyed playing around with them and had forgotten that they were actually pretty decent pieces of software.

I still prefer the pre-ribbon bar era of MS Office :)

Funny you should comment about screensavers, the first thing I did when I loaded the Win98 emulation these comments refer to was the display settings then clicked 'Preview' on the pipes screensaver. I believe there was also one that looked a little like Wolf32?

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