6 ms·

Greetings, fellow old people.

davidw 14d ago
Yeah I had one of those as a kid and spent many happy hours learning about it and of course playing games.
boltzmann-brain 14d ago
my first internet was on a commodore, on a C128, with a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. we got insane speeds! seconds per character!
- reaperducer 14d ago
  a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity. People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-inch monitor isn't OLED. We would hack mainframes on the other side of the planet with a 40x7 character unlit LCD, and no internet.
  - IAmBroom 14d ago
    Dade Murphy, is that you? Did you and Angelina Jolie really get it on?
    - boltzmann-brain 14d ago
      i don't kiss and tell!
  - boltzmann-brain 14d ago
    a character LCD was an upgrade. try tiny 14" b&w tv!
    - reaperducer 14d ago
      14"? Luxury! My C-64 was hooked up to a nine-inch Panasonic. Though it was color, so I guess you still win.
      - boltzmann-brain 13d ago
        Color? Luxury! To experience color, we had to use transparent glass panes painted with stripes of blue, green, and yellow for sky trees and ground respectively! And they didn't make them in the right size for my tv!!
layer8 14d ago
I wonder what today’s youngster hackers will reminisce over in 44 years.
- poisonborz 14d ago
  That they still had some sort of control
  - leptons 14d ago
    ouch
- thm 14d ago
  Talking predominantly to humans on a web forum.
- tsm 14d ago
  I still think that I'm young, but I currently reminisce about doing real work without an always-on internet connection (and using saved-to-disk HTML documentation, physical books, etc.), and I am looking forward to reminiscing about writing thousands of lines of code, debugging tricky issues, etcetera with my own fingers and brain instead of outsourcing to an LLM.
- wateralien 14d ago
  This is a great question
mkovach 14d ago
We are not old. We've just typed more words than Stephen King and probably written scarier stories in a single sprint.
tech_army 14d ago
Hello hello Age is just a number lol
RetroTechie 14d ago
> Greetings, fellow old people. Greetings back! The only drawback is that (statistically speaking) remaining lifespan is shorter for a 'greybeard' than a youngster. Apart from that, I feel lucky to have experienced in my life the introduction of: b/w -> color TV, walkmans, home/personal computers, networks/BBSes, floppy/hard drives, CD/DVD/BR, LAN parties, 3D gaming, internet, mp3 players, mobile phones, smartphones, cheapo+powerful compute hw like Raspberry Pi family, and now AI. Not to mention enormous advances in science (especially medical), materials technology & general wealth. I could go on but you get the picture. We truly are living in an age of marvels. My dad's day job (so 1 gen back) mostly involved paperwork & manually calculating numbers on a calculator. Public libraries did housekeeping on paper cards (see a previous submission of mine), and did so for generations. A century+ ago most people spent their days in agriculture & living under desperately poor conditions. No doubt today's youngsters will see many advances of their own. But they won't eg. appreciate what cheap cpu's can do, as they haven't witnessed a time those didn't exist. Smartphones & co have been around them since birth. Greybeards among us are lucky to have the perspective of experiencing that 'tech-hockeystick-curve' of the past ~50y or so.
gtk40 14d ago
Funny enough, I'm only in my early 30s and grew up with the Commodore 64. It was the basement computer that I could do whatever I wanted to, whereas the Windows computer (initially 3.1 and got upgraded all the way to 98) computer upstairs had to be shared and had more supervision. So I enjoyed writing a lot of code and trying things. I managed to have quite a collection of software and accessories just by asking around who still had stuff in the late 90s and early 00s in their basement for an 80s computer, and more did than you would expect.
- leptons 14d ago
  That's amazing. I often thought that if I had kids, this is how I'd introduce computers to them. Give them a great C64 setup, the whole manual and when they can do something impressive, then they get a more powerful computer - an Amiga, lol. Did you ever get into the "demo scene"?
davepeck 14d ago
Some of my fave C64 memories as a kid: listening to cassette tapes with stuff stored on them, punching in COMPUTE! listings with MLX, discovering 6510 and learning the Merlin assembler, long runs in Moon Patrol, making sprites with Gary Kitchen’s GameMaker, trying to understand how GEOS could possibly work, wearing out the spiral binding of the Programmer’s Reference Guide.
theflyingelvis 14d ago
Sup

Yeah I had one of those as a kid and spent many happy hours learning about it and of course playing games.

my first internet was on a commodore, on a C128, with a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. we got insane speeds! seconds per character!

reaperducer 14d ago
a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity. People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-inch monitor isn't OLED. We would hack mainframes on the other side of the planet with a 40x7 character unlit LCD, and no internet.
- IAmBroom 14d ago
  Dade Murphy, is that you? Did you and Angelina Jolie really get it on?
  - boltzmann-brain 14d ago
    i don't kiss and tell!
- boltzmann-brain 14d ago
  a character LCD was an upgrade. try tiny 14" b&w tv!
  - reaperducer 14d ago
    14"? Luxury! My C-64 was hooked up to a nine-inch Panasonic. Though it was color, so I guess you still win.
    - boltzmann-brain 13d ago
      Color? Luxury! To experience color, we had to use transparent glass panes painted with stripes of blue, green, and yellow for sky trees and ground respectively! And they didn't make them in the right size for my tv!!

layer8 14d ago

I wonder what today’s youngster hackers will reminisce over in 44 years.

poisonborz 14d ago
That they still had some sort of control
- leptons 14d ago
  ouch
thm 14d ago
Talking predominantly to humans on a web forum.
tsm 14d ago
I still think that I'm young, but I currently reminisce about doing real work without an always-on internet connection (and using saved-to-disk HTML documentation, physical books, etc.), and I am looking forward to reminiscing about writing thousands of lines of code, debugging tricky issues, etcetera with my own fingers and brain instead of outsourcing to an LLM.
wateralien 14d ago
This is a great question

mkovach 14d ago

We are not old. We've just typed more words than Stephen King and probably written scarier stories in a single sprint.

tech_army 14d ago

Hello hello Age is just a number lol

RetroTechie 14d ago

> Greetings, fellow old people. Greetings back! The only drawback is that (statistically speaking) remaining lifespan is shorter for a 'greybeard' than a youngster. Apart from that, I feel lucky to have experienced in my life the introduction of: b/w -> color TV, walkmans, home/personal computers, networks/BBSes, floppy/hard drives, CD/DVD/BR, LAN parties, 3D gaming, internet, mp3 players, mobile phones, smartphones, cheapo+powerful compute hw like Raspberry Pi family, and now AI. Not to mention enormous advances in science (especially medical), materials technology & general wealth. I could go on but you get the picture. We truly are living in an age of marvels. My dad's day job (so 1 gen back) mostly involved paperwork & manually calculating numbers on a calculator. Public libraries did housekeeping on paper cards (see a previous submission of mine), and did so for generations. A century+ ago most people spent their days in agriculture & living under desperately poor conditions. No doubt today's youngsters will see many advances of their own. But they won't eg. appreciate what cheap cpu's can do, as they haven't witnessed a time those didn't exist. Smartphones & co have been around them since birth. Greybeards among us are lucky to have the perspective of experiencing that 'tech-hockeystick-curve' of the past ~50y or so.

gtk40 14d ago

Funny enough, I'm only in my early 30s and grew up with the Commodore 64. It was the basement computer that I could do whatever I wanted to, whereas the Windows computer (initially 3.1 and got upgraded all the way to 98) computer upstairs had to be shared and had more supervision. So I enjoyed writing a lot of code and trying things. I managed to have quite a collection of software and accessories just by asking around who still had stuff in the late 90s and early 00s in their basement for an 80s computer, and more did than you would expect.

leptons 14d ago
That's amazing. I often thought that if I had kids, this is how I'd introduce computers to them. Give them a great C64 setup, the whole manual and when they can do something impressive, then they get a more powerful computer - an Amiga, lol. Did you ever get into the "demo scene"?

davepeck 14d ago

Some of my fave C64 memories as a kid: listening to cassette tapes with stuff stored on them, punching in COMPUTE! listings with MLX, discovering 6510 and learning the Merlin assembler, long runs in Moon Patrol, making sprites with Gary Kitchen’s GameMaker, trying to understand how GEOS could possibly work, wearing out the spiral binding of the Programmer’s Reference Guide.

theflyingelvis 14d ago

Sup