Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

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I'm disappointed that you said "2400bps" instead of "2400 baud". :/

It's always surprising to me when I see people being nostalgic for the old days. Yes, things seemed simpler, but it was because there was less you could do.

I'll always fondly remember my attempt to get on GeoLink with a 300 baud modem, and then my parents realizing that the long distance calls made it far, far too expensive to use, and returning it. Sure, I was disappointed at the time, but it wasn't too much later that 56k modems existed and we had a local unlimited internet provider. And now it's a fun story.

But I was actually just as frustrated at the time as I am now, but for different reasons. Change exists, and that's good.

I agree that it feels harder to make your mark today. But I don't think it's actually harder. There's plenty of fun things that people would love to see people do. Just yesterday, I found out about the Strudel musical programming language and watched an amazing video of someone making Trance with it. And those kind of discoveries happen constantly now, where they were pretty seldom back 30 years ago.

We're at the point that anyone can make a game, app, webpage, etc if they put enough effort into it. The tools are so easy and the tutorials are so plentiful and free that it's really just about effort, instead of being blocked from it.

I've been saying "we live in the future" about once a month for years now. It's amazing what we have today.

> Yes, things seemed simpler, but it was because there was less you could do.

And because computing was less mature and a younger field overall. If computers remained stagnant for 500 years, fixed as they were in 1980, I bet that programming would become increasingly more complex, just to enable doing do more with less

From no internet to internet but only at work, to 56k at home, to DSL, to fiber. That's quite a ride in one lifetime.

For me, starting with 1978 hand soldered NASCOM-1 kit (2MHz Z80, 1KB RAM for user, 1KB for display) to my current hand built 10-year old tower with a core i7-5930K processor.

2MHz 8-bit -> 3.5GHz 64-bit multi-core CPU

1KB -> 32GB RAM (a factor of 32 million times more memory !!)

audio casette storage -> 4TB HDD

16x48 char display -> GTX 980 Ti 2560x1600 gfx (+ 6 TFLOPs)

offline -> 9600 baud BBS -> 1Gbps fiber + internet

From hand assembling on paper (or just entering memorized hex opcodes directly into memory) to vibe coding "build me an app to do xxx", or talking to Gemini on my iPhone (would have looked like an alien artifact in 1978) asking it pretty much anything.

What will the next 50 years bring? Will it be as amazing as NASCOM-1 -> iPhone + Gemini? I used to think so, and certainly in 50 years I'd expect full-blown human-level AGI to be here, but will it feel that much different ?

> I'm disappointed that you said "2400bps" instead of "2400 baud". :/

haha :-) It was of course 2400 baud and we were using FidoNET which was very very exciting at that time in Zimbabwe. We'd spend 10 minutes trying to get a dial tone sometimes but it was magic when you connected and saw something was coming in. International telephone calls were so expensive that we talked to my brothers overseas once or twice a month at best. With email we could chat every day if we wanted.

The limitation then was information - no internet, no manuals no documentation. I wrote a text editor and did my best to make it fast with clever schemes but it always flickered. Many years later a pal at university in South Africa casually mentioned that graphics memory was slow so it was actually best to write to memory and then REP MOVSB that to the graphics memory. I cursed out loud at this and asked him how he knew that?! Well, he lived in a more modern country and could buy the right books. Nowadays you really can be a linux kernel programmer in the Congo if you want to.

Thank you for sharing this. I started as a youngling on a 300 baud modem. 1200 baud upgrade modems had a zeitgeist of being just for piracy — who else would need so much bandwidth said those who charged by the minute. Information wasn’t flowing freely and resource-dense countries had advantages to spread it around themselves. Before HTTP and WWW there wasn’t much information architecture existent either.

But what makes me happy to hear is that - on the other side of the planet - random kids were also plugging in a modem, to get connected with each other and press at the edge of the future.

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