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Comment by omarforgotpwd | Hacker News Reader

"Remember that shitty computer we got when we were first came to the US?" -- Kids, recounting this experience in 15 years

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I'm typing on the highest end MBPr you can buy, but my first computer was a 286 with DOS and a handful of programs - this was just after Windows 95 came out, so it was quite shitty for the day. However, no computer has been quite as magical as that one. While I get paid good money to produce code every day, and I think it's damn good code, I don't feel nearly as productive as I did when I was learning to write QBasic and batch scripts for the first time.

My first computer (I didn't own it, but I got to use it often when I was about 4-6) was a Sun SPARCstation pizza box. Fond memories, I think most of my later interest in computers came from playing around on that thing when I was hardly older than a toddler.

My first computer was a Casio calculator (so, basically not a computer) with monochrome screen. It was programmable in BASIC and it came with a 500 pages manual. I loved that thing. I spent months playing with it!

Likewise, typing on 2014 Mac Air currently, but my family's first computer was a Commodore VIC20 (I learned BASIC on that) and some years later my dad got me my own computer, an XT (8086) with a 20MB HD (how will I use all that space?!).

I loved both of those computers more than any I've had since.

Now I have a daughter. She won't be getting a Mac. She'll be getting an old box with some flavor of Linux installed and she's going to learn how to really use a computer (only if she's willing and interested, of course). The apps and windows will be there, but I am primarily going to focus teaching her command line and code. Otherwise it's just a gadget and a lot harder to love.

I should also point out that I came from a dirt-poor family, and this was when I was 17, making it the more significant to me.

"Remember that shitty computer we had 15 years ago?" -- Everybody

Indeed! Loved it

It's natural to have loving disdain for the things you had to make do with.

Share in the nostalgia.

Yeah.

The shitty computers of yesterday were amazing.

Today? It does the job beautifully. But there's no soul.

I loved that Macintosh Performa 630CD

I still have my old Compaq Presario 1210 sitting in my bedroom. It's been with me for a good 15 years. Was originally my mom's, but she pretty much abandoned it and eventually said "here, son, it's yours if you can get it working".

So I did. Upgraded from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. Saw that the modem broke (was some cheap WinModem that Win2000 didn't support anymore), but was happy that it ran a somewhat-modern operating system at the time. Then switched to Win98SE to get the modem working again (which not only failed at that task, but also caused the sound to not work). Switched back to Win2000, then DOS 6.22 + Win3.1, then Win2000, then DOS + Win3.1, then Damn Small Linux, then FreeDOS, then Softlanding Linux System.

During that time, the power supply partially failed (would hang if taken off AC power, even with a healthy battery), the CD-ROM drive got buggy, and the lid had a hard time staying up. It finally died a few months ago (fans spin, but nothing on the screen and no floppy drive initialization; perhaps the BIOS went kaput for some reason?). It's like your dog dying; it's something that you come to expect as the years add on, yet you're never really prepared for it. Yet, unlike the death of a pet, at least there's some hope of figuring out which part it is I need to replace.

Thus, it's only a matter of time before I fix it again. I'll never give up on you, buddy, 'cause you never gave up on me.

The CAME to the U.S., they weren't BORN here, so they don't have that ingrained elitist entitled attitude.

[citation needed]

I came here and wasn't born here, older than those kids in the story. Fortunately I still managed to learn my elitist entitled attitude.

You know what is crazier than this? When kids will say "remember ipads and iphones?" That is the other end of this spectrum, but goes to show that in 15 years everything will be horrible when compared to current tech

I'm typing this on a core duo laptop manufactured in March 2010. It has 2Gb RAM, an SSD that I fitted myself, Intel integrated graphics and wifi. It runs any Linux OS fine, and can run quite demanding applications. Gnome 3 remains responsive with 10 windows from 4 applications open. CPU usage is relatively low, peaking at 60 to 70% from around 15% when I move or resize Firefox windows with a lot of javascript content.

What do you think is shitty about the donated PC?

My neighbor gave me an Apple II+ he had bought from a yardsale and never used. I was pretty stoked. This was in 1999, and the computer was already probably 18 years old.

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