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@nomad2035 @thegibson “Robber Baron” is too gentle. These people are cold predators.

@TheGibson i am old. I grew up in the world you described. I didn’t know it as any manifesto, it was just 075.txt in the Jolly Roger, or “Mentors last words” I used to take the train into my local 2600 meet.

I work in DevOps now. It pays bills but my love for it has been… hard to find at times.

A few years back i wandered into the dark sky areas of the northern Arizona desert on the Colorado plateau, and on a moonless night I looked up and saw the Milky Way spinning lazily overhead, accompanied by a sky so full of stars one could see no black.

I am no ludite, but the last time I was truly excited about a computer, it gave me access to a world denied to me. Now that I am older and have all the access I want and more, what excites me the most, is putting it down.

@jbarros @thegibson I feel this in my bones.

I grew up in front of my C64. I spent my teenage years in front of my Amiga. Demoparties, all-night hackery sessions, weird coding projects all driven by passion and wonder. The late 90s were magic - the internet had so much promise.

I work in embedded dev. I'm happy with my job - but it's a *job*. I don't feel the way about computing I used to - mostly, modern computing (as defined by Big Tech) just makes me miserable. A grotesque money trench crawling with the worst people in the world. I feel like all the promise is gone - the new promise is only about exploiting, extracting and enclosing, and replacing a bunch of people with shitty robots.

When the world was rough and I needed to escape, I used to fire up the computer and put my head into some thorny programming problem (often of dubious utility). Now, I arrange bonsai, read books and largely wish I lived in a wooden cabin far from the long claws of Silicon Valley.

@TheGibson Yes..I remember it well.
For me, it wasn't green and black. It was fuzzy, misaligned greyscale of a C64 on a somewhat crappy 12 inch TV with a single steel antenna on top.
The picture was so twisted that I had one leg of the TV propped up to even the picture out.
It was a Volksmodem 6420 300 baud modem, dialing into a Lobo TRS-80 compatible system.
It was amazing!

@r3t3ch @jb @neil @thegibson (Una mujer colombiana me enseña español. Nos encontramos todas semanas. ¡Es muy bien!)

@thegibson
Got my first modem & BBS access when I was 13, 1983. So yeah. Super-l33t. White on blue for me.

Having a hand-sized computer (Palm Pilot) I could program and read books on (in 160x160 greenscale!); getting Internet, and later phone, and then the iPhone putting a whole-ass Mac in there, were nice upgrades, but that first hit was awesome.

Getting decently-run remote hosting VPS, instead of shared hosting, so I could put up anything I want and not worry about getting booted.

@thegibson I grew up typing BASIC programs in from copies of 80 Micro I got every month into a TRS-80 Model III. Later, I ran DOS, Desqview, and then OS/2 on an IBM PS/2 50Z and my modem talked to people on the BBS I ran. I learned C and felt that sense of wonder that I could truly create something.

I think corporate life ruined it. I still program but not that much and it's mostly DevOps now which is such a short-sighted "discipline". I used to call it Systems Administration.

Now I more or less babysit web developers (not programmers) who copy & paste code in from the internet that other people wrote.. often very badly that takes up so much CPU and memory it makes me want to cry.

I try to make the systems as secure as possible but nobody appreciates it.

@thegibson Sometimes I look at the ONT, where the fibre connection terminates in my house and converts to ethernet. I wonder at the amount of data flowing through it, the connection it gives me to the outside world, the impossibility of imagining synchronous 900Mbps when I was on dial-up in my teenage years.

Next time you see a network cable, marvel at what it does.

@thegibson My folks got us a Commodore Vic20. I loved that thing. The off white housing. The rounded tape deck. I would spend hours coding BASIC from the back of magazines. I remember the excitement at seeing Commodore programming books in the scholastic book club. I begged my folks to buy me one to code my own text adventure game. I spent most of the summer school holiday typing it out, and making sure to not turn it off and lose my work. I was close to finishing it when my mom unknowingly unplugged it to plug in the vacuum cleaner. All my work was gone. I cried that day

@Rob_T_Firefly @thegibson ooof! The pain fades, the seething rage never dies

@Rob_T_Firefly @thegibson @sh3llcmdr
I learned to save early, save often, on to cheap 10 or 15 minute cassettes which were too short for anyone to tape music over.

@sh3llcmdr @Rob_T_Firefly @thegibson
With 1K of RAM, I usually never *needed* to back up incomplete work to tape!

Whether I was typing in listings from magazines or books, or coding my own ideas, there was always some testing and debugging needed. My "save early, save often" was usually one save every couple of hours, after finding and fixing a typo. Saving the new version on top of the previous one on the same cassette. No version numbering, no revision control. That came later (much later).

@TheGibson Amateur radio and digital modes.

@thegibson when I moved from centralized social networks to the #Fediverse. It was much less strong I must admit, but it was the same feeling as joining dds (de digitale stad) in the 90's.

@thegibson I was pretty unimpressed with the Logo exposure at my first computer camp my dad sent me to, but when we worked together in GW Basic on the 888 a bit later it was really cool. Stuff we put in made a whole program! It was a math problem generator so I could practice arithmetic.

Moments of that come to me still in tildes and small community spaces. It's not the tech that wows me anymore but the connections.

@thegibson @thegibson
Oh, the memories! It was around 1998 and my uncle gifted me a Lenovo laptop to tinker around with...I reset all the keystrokes to make funny sounds (really cool to an 11 y/o kid)
Then a long came MySpsce and taught myself HTML code to make a super sweet page
Fast forward to present day and I thankfully have a career that allows me to routinely delve into problem solving..requiring me to go "on a quest" in a very meaningful way that brings me immense joy. Even when the job security feels uncertain or the problems (often) blow up in my face ..I still have that question to ask and seek an answer..and when I start to see a pattern and get a little convergent validity happening it's what keeps me going

@thegibson I started writing programs in the mid-70s.

To be honest, I've kept feeling that thrill much of the time though it has flattened considerably. And yet philosophically I feel that most of technology was a mistake.

I got a Wifi speaker last month - I've been trying not to buy any gear but it's been over a year since I had any sort of speaker at all, everything is in storage.

It was funky for the first little bit but then figured out my network and has been rock solid.

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