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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

I don't think computers are still "fun".

The distinct atmosphere of geeky fun that computing had in the 80s and 90s through the early 00s just doesn't exist anymore. Erased in favour of cleanliness because big monies and liabilities (and fragile fee fees) started to get involved. We will never see the likes of MS Office Assistants or whipping some llama asses ever again.

I still "like" computing as a hobby because I grew up on the stuff, but if I were a kid again today I wouldn't bat an eye at computing because there's no "fun" in it anymore. Nothing about computing today blows the mind, child or adult.

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>I don't think computers are still "fun". The distinct atmosphere of geeky fun that computing had in the 80s and 90s through the early 00s just doesn't exist anymore.

I disagree. It exists live and well but you must be looking for it in the wrong places.

You won't find it on any app store but they have moved to the Linux FOSS communities and projects, like KDE for example. Or even games from indie game studios that you can find on steam. Also look into communities developing game mods or OSS ports of classic games. Or people trying to run Doom/Quake on various devices. Or playing around with FPGAs. That's where the geeky fun is nowadays.

You can also still build your own PC instead of buying a prebuilt or a Mac.

If you're willing to look beyond the walled gardens and the mainstream billion dollar corporations and game studios, you'll find the fun.

>You won't find it on any app store but they have moved to the Linux FOSS communities and projects, like KDE for example. Or even games from indie game studios that you can find on steam.

FOSS and indies only care about ideologies, they are not the devs from the 80s and 90s who just had simple fun and gave us simple fun.

>Also look into communities developing game mods or OSS ports of classic games. Or people trying to run Doom/Quake on various devices. That's where the geeky fun is nowadays.

They're a different style of fun to the fun we're talking about.

>You can also still build your own PC instead of buying a prebuilt or a Mac.

I build all my computers (laptops aside, obviously), because pre-builts are a scam and waste of time.

>If you're willing to look beyond the walled gardens and the mainstream billion dollar corporations and game studios, you'll find the fun.

Been there, done that; 404 Fun Not Found. Nothing about modern computing evokes an innocent "Wow!" or snicker from me anymore, and I find that very sad.

>Nothing about modern computing evokes an innocent "Wow!" or snicker from me anymore, and I find that very sad.

It feels like there is fun out there to be had but for some reason (stubbornness? Rose tinted glasses?) you're not having any of it. Just this week I saw a 13 year old in a cafe coding something for Minecraft. I had no idea people did that but I enjoyed his enthusiasm and I learned something new that day.

Don't want to sound mean but maybe you've gotten old and your tastes have calcified trying to hang on to times long gone by instead of moving on and trying the new things on the menu.

My playlist is also stuck in the '80s but that doesn't mean there's no good music coming out now that I can also enjoy.

You're also free to pickup vintage computers and tinker with them, or even better, get into embedded and FPGA programming like I said before. There's a whole plethora of options out there that can WoW you. Something must fit you if you keep an open mind and not expect the '90s to come roaring back.

I'm an old dog myself and today there's way more cool stuff for me to tinker than in the old days, better and more open and easier to access tools I just like the free time for it.

I feel you. We got our first computer in, I think, 1994? I was 12. It was a Gateway 2000 486 something. haha I can't remember the letters on the end. It was magic. Oh, and AOL of course.

It continued to feel that way because it was kind of newer territory to a lot of people in general. Now, it is just standard... everywhere... I think the mass adoption is the fun killer. It was much more niche back then.

Those were the good days, between me and my buddies we had a Pavkard Bell, a Micron, a Gateway 2000, and a home built or two. We played C&C, red alert, doom, quake, descent and some old fashioned board game Axis and Allies when we got tired on the computers.

Spot on. Awesome post. My first PC was a 1995 486 clone no name PC with a Cyrix (!!!) 57 MHz cpu and 4 megs of ram. Originally it came only with a floppy drive and a 420MB HD. I bought this sound blaster-like card with a CD-ROM drive attached to it and picked up Slackware Linux 3.0 distributed via a computer magazine. It wouldn’t install at first because the cd drive was attached via the sound blaster clone card so I had to install it via many floppies instead. I finally got it working. I really miss those days where things were hard and required work to make things seamless. Today even Windows runs Linux so there’s no incentive to geek out anymore.

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