Computing in the good ole’ days
26 Aug 2005Lately I’ve seen another of articles about things that happened a decade or so ago in a time I affectionately term the good ole’ days of computing.
- An era where games were fun and could occupy my attention for longer than 5 minutes.
- An era where installing an operating system and just learning the in’s/out’s of it was interesting (Windows or Linux, didn’t matter to me at the time).
- An era where you took pride in buying white box components and building your PC from scratch.
An era where it cost you $2500 to get a 17″ monitor that wouldn’t kill you (the NEC 5FGp).
10 years ago, Netscape IPO’d. Pretty notable event in the grand scheme of things.
10 years ago, Windows 95 was released. Again, a pretty notable happening (not necessary because of it’s technical achievements but more so on the sheer product marketing). For some reason (I think I wanted a free copy), I was a beta testing for the OS.
10 years ago, I started using Linux. I remember the good ole days of slackware and kernel 1.2.8. Kudo’s to the guys at Island Internet for hiring a young 14 or 15 year old and getting him started.
I was a long-time BBS’er but I still remember the first time I used the Internet, and no it wasn’t via SLIP or PPP. It was fun to navigate with gopher. During the hey-day of buffer overflows you couldn’t help but learn how to properly secure and administer a linux box. I used to enjoy installing and re-installing different linux distributions, purposely breaking them along the way.
People today don’t have (or choose to partake in) the same opportunities. The average linux distribution nowadays is quite polished, supports just about every _common_ piece of hardware, and doesn’t require a lot of messing around with for day to day operation. There’s GUI management utilities for everything and no real need to understand the shell and/or core system configurations.
In the development world there’s a plethora of libraries allowing you to accomplish things that simply weren’t possible previously. For me professionally, this is an obvious benefit. It’s also cool on a personal level, I can write a RoR (Ruby on Rails) application and instantly have support for XMLHttpRequest and the whole ajax idealogy (which albeit is not a new technology but has a ton of publicity and momentum) without writing any boiler plate or integration code.
The computing industry has progressed exponentially over the past decade, solving many problems, yet opening the door on countless new areas of focus. I think this last point is arguably my main career motivator. I thrive in an ever changing environment.
What’s Changed
I think the most obvious thing is that I’ve grown up and so has the technical world around me. More often than not I find myself suffering from information overload. There is just so much stuff nowadays that is worth reading, understanding and experimenting with that it’s difficult to narrow and filter it down. If I don’t clean out my aggregator once a day, I’m screwd.
The other obvious change is that I don’t have parents to support my habits anymore (it was good while it lasted, thanks dad). I have a degree, a job, and all the responsibilities that go along with that. Not to mention that my job has me using a laptop for 9 or 10 hours a day. It’s a good life, challenging to the point where I wouldn’t want it any other way, but it’s not necessarily what I envisioned myself doing 10 years ago.
What really got me started on this topic was reading this washington post article from the day Windows 95 launched.
Time Flies!