Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

GP was complimenting M$. As for "growing up", it seems that the younger fanbois are more sensitive to a fairly innocuous shorthand than those of us who remember computing in the '90s.

View on HN

I think this is probably because hackers in younger generations never experienced the beast that was Microsoft in the 90s and have seen the progression of MS as one from "company that makes boring and/or bad OS" to the embrace of FOSS that's been happening recently.

I'm personally super interested in tech and hacking history, so I've read all the war stories, the pleas on FOSS homepages, the rants on sites like jwz's, books like Microserfs, etc. But even the most talented hackers who are 16-24 right now probably see Microsoft as "the Xbox company."

Not true - 21 here, was only born in 1993. I'm aware of the disputes that have happened over time, especially arguments with Netscape / Jobs / etc. Microsoft has a pretty interesting and rich history, and I was extremely surprised about the recent open source announcements. I read somewhere they actually have an open source branch, it's just not widely talked about, mainly because Windows overshadows it.

I'm not trying to make an ultimatum - there will definitely be exceptions, as I pointed out myself. But if you ask around, most people in that demographic won't know about the story of MS, won't have seen stuff like the Gates deposition video, etc. The most you'll get is a vague notion of Microsoft being called evil by greybeards.

He was using a good product, yet had to lament the fact it was a Microsoft product.

And I am by no means fanboy or young. Just don't like silly potshots like that on any side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com