Back in the day we had to rely on magazines for information, the books in the library were too old to cover the new stuff. Then it was BBS dialup filesharing boards, then the internet became a thing.
My first exposure to programming in the early 80s was copying in a BASIC game from some magazine. I read Byte Magazine for Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar and dreamed of buying an IBM compatible. Dr Dobbs Journal was just an incredible eye opener into the world of serious compute science / engineering , particularly Mike Abrashs column on 3D - it was a black art - and a series on implementing unix.
It was great to see Linux Format and game mags in the early 00s, but I guess all good things evolve. Back then we would have wanted infinite information at our fingertips, one device to be a camera, mp3 player and phone all-in-one .. and flat screens that you could lift with one hand, so Im not complaining.
I do worry that young people just see the magic, and dont learn how things actually work under the hood .. I think Scratch and Minecraft are wonderful in this regard because you get to construct things yourself.
If we humans can build all these amazing things .. theres a chance we'll get our collective shit together and address climate change.
Humans are great and making things. Making collective decisions that might make everyone’s lives suck more in the short term and possibly not make much difference in the long term isn’t interesting to a lot of people. The only real way to reduce carbon emissions is via innovation. If you care about climate change stop protesting and start innovating.
The reason for climate change isn't a lack of technical innovation. We have ALL the innovations to change things. The reason for climate change is short-sighted greed, and a lack of political will, not a lack of scientific or technological capability.
The best thing we can do besides innovation is probably to put a brake on overconsumption by killing modern advertising practices.
Right here, officer, this is the terrorist that threatened eternally growing GDP!
Advertising is cancer.
A lack of will by the body politic or the lack of authority to compel behaviours of the electorate against its will?
Climate change is an unpriced economic externality. It's a political problem, not a technical problem.
If you want innovation, then create a market incentive for it. But that requires pushing bills that would wreck the prospects of oil companies, and cause trillions of stranded assets, so they lobby against it.
Since there are no alternatives for the most part, this just becomes a lossy income redistribution program (with lots of opportunity for corruption). Also, as governments can simply decree who has to pay it and who is exempt it has the net effect of centralizing government power. If you want empirical evidence, just see what is happening in Canada.
The general public seems pretty opposed to higher fossil fuel prices.
It has been an awesome and humbling experience to witness the last 40 years of computing. I wrote my first programs in Fortran on punched cards. Trying to live a healthy lifestyle so that I can witness the next 40 years.
My first computer program was taking an entire "choose your own adventure" type book and implementing it in Basic on my Commodore Vic-20. Took up all but about eleven bytes of RAM that I could cram into the thing, including the 16KB RAM module plugged into the back. That was the summer of 1982, two years before I graduated high school.
I didn't start writing COBOL and FORTRAN programs on punched cards for the IBM 3081 mainframe until I got into college, in the fall of 1984.
My friend's father had a Vic-20. I remember watching him type in basic programs from magazines. Then backing up on a casette.
Most of what I learned about computing in those early days came from Byte Magazine.
I still want to know when we are going to get our Transputers that can run machine language code from any architecture of CPU, because even their microcode can be rewritten in software on the fly -- beyond what we can do with FPGAs.
I love this post.
It’s okay to have nostalgia for those times and still appreciate what we have now.
It’s a great point how we would have swapped that for this at that point of time.
After buying several issues of MaximumPC and many conversations with people at work who could explain to me some of the questions I had, I finally used info from two separate issues to make a parts list. I drove to the nearest Fry's Electronic, Plano, Texas, and build my first PC. What a thrill! I marveled that I could build something that was so cutting-edge.