What's your favourite time for computing? [podcast]
Вставка
- Опубліковано 14 жов 2023
- Let's face it... computing in general in 2023 sucks. There are interesting things going on, for sure, but does the computing of the modern age really bring you joy? I'd loooove to hear from you and what your favourite period was.
For example, When was the last time you wrote a line of code in QuickBasic and smiled? When is the last time you built your own AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to squeeze a bit more of that 640K? When did you last smell the great smell of thousands of volts warming cathode ray tubes, the clacking of type M IBM keybaords, the ability to do all your tasks in an entirely text-based environment that wasn't slow and sucky?
When did you last think of your computer as a fun thing, rather than a tool? Was it the 40s-60s, 70s, 80s, 90s or even the 00s? I'd love to hear from you, as over 200 of you already did on youtube in a poll. Here, I talk to you candidly about the evolution of computers and where my excitement of computers really came in to play.
Thumbnail background image courtesy of Clemson University Libraries.
Don't forget to LIKE this video and please SUBSCRIBE to my channel! Press that NOTIFICATION bell so you get to know when new great videos come out that you'll like! I really do appreciate your subscriptions, it makes the countless hours I spend on this channel feel so worthwhile!
If you really like my stuff and fancy joining this channel to get access to perks, you'll be helping me develop the channel for the future with new equipment and spurn me on for more content:
/ @alsgeeklab
I still have Patreon too: / alsgeeklab
Or buy me a quick coffee on Ko-Fi: www.ko-fi.com/alsgeeklab
On the web & social media:
www.alsgeeklab.com
Twitter: / alsgeeklab
Facebook: / alsgeeklab
Instagram: / alsgeeklab
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #infosec - Наука та технологія
My favorite time for computing was from 1983 to 1996. Essentially from the dawn of the IBM XT with a built-in hard drive, to the introduction of the Pentium Pro, which was the basis for all modern x86 Intel processors. This era saw the move from 16-bit computing to 32-bit, as well as the dawn of the GUI. A lot of big and small players were trying to innovate their place in the market with interesting and sometimes niche products. And yes, the ability to connect to other machines via a modulator/demodulator on the phone line was incredible. I remember building my first 10Mbit home network around the end of this era, which enabled me to transfer files and play games with others. We moved from manually configured I/O, DMA, and IRQs to Plug'n'Play.
I think computer games made their best leaps in technology after this era, but 1983 to 1996 remains my favorite timeline for computing.
For me, the 60s and 70s at MIT with Messer's Gosper, Greenblatt and Steve "Slug" Russell ... read this last guy if you like video games!
Yeah as much as I had somewhat nostalgia for the 90s (born in ‘99 so missed out on most of it but some stragglers from that era continued to the 2000s like the original PlayStation) I think the 60s-70s was the most interesting pair of decades, like it was primordial computer history, it represents the last bits of this early era and these university and research fueled non commercial efforts to get computing off the ground and the development of some of the first proper Operating Systems and esp preemptive multitasking timesharing OSes, the beginnings of Unix, and the last embers of the hacker era, when Emacs and BSD and Tex. And the late 70s marked the beginning of the microcomputer revolution that led to the Apple II and Commodore and yadda yadda all the cool shit most people care about
I just have the biggest connection to before that because it’s the genesis point of GNU (EMacs and the Lisp drama of the late 70s and thus the end of the AI Lab hacker culture) and Unix and BSD, and I am a Unix nerd, and then there were strange shit like MIT’s ITS and the Multics project that preceded Unix. It’s all history I wish gets dug back up one day…
Loved the video - a nice chilled out way to relive some memories.
That 87-97 period was my peak of interest and will always be my favourite. That move from a mono/xt to a 486/svga and multimedia kit with an internet connection felt like I’d experienced some sort of revolution lol
Now I just feel like a fossil given the tech everyones got today..
I guess some of it relates to the age (im a similar age to your good self) and when computing started to matter for you.
…makes me want to watch the mother of all demos again😅
I'll be doing a video on the mother of all demos some time soon, so watch out for that, make sure you have notifications set to All! I agree with you on the 87-97 for sure!
I like all eras of computing i can't choose my favourite era i think its either the early 80s or the y2k years. i think the early 80s were very interesting as a collector because there were so many unique systems that had their unique architecture with their own strengths and weaknesses and their own game library that was different from the other systems . its kind of hard to explain this concept to people who are not interested in retro computers .like i show them a zxspectrum and they ask does this run ms dos or unix? and i say no it just has build in basic and they get confused. so this era is very interesting older computers are much rarer and usually only have text.
i also like the y2k years because i am young so i can't remember much from before this time so its nostalgic the 80s are interesting because it was different but this is what i consider the beginning of modern computing. and it was very impressive going from an old 286 that used floppies to using a pc with cdrom drive and having a lot of colours and realistic sound and dialup internet. the possibilities seemed endless. this was the first time you had truly access to more media than you could ever hope to consume. like i would see those old clip art cd's and i was just blown away so much stuff on 1 disc. and with the internet i could pretty much see and read and hear almost anything i wanted i would google something absurd and it actually existed.
and i liked the culture of the time because most software would let you customise things and gave you a lot more options. nowadays they try to minimalize everything and make it so simple they actually remove good features. and it seems like there was just a lot more innovation and creativity they tried new stuff. it seems like all the companies are doing the same thing and the top websites have not changed in over 10 years apart from some bad ones like tiktok .while in the 90s and 2000s new stuff showed up all the time and users were less tolerant of a website made big mistakes they would move to another one. like if youtube launched in its current form in 2005 but with 2005 era video quality and video length limitations .i would probably be watching this on daily planet right now because youtube is just really bad now in terms of ui and customer support . but it has all the content so people don't check other websites and people don't want to upload their stuff on other websites because they don't get enough views so other sites a roomed no matter how good they are. and i think if my space and yahoo remained popular until 2012 they would still be huge today. because people don't want to switch platforms anymore and are too used to the same thing. its kind of similar to what happened in the 80s at first there were many systems but ibm pc and apple mac took over and while there where much better systems like the amiga most people ignored them because ibm had more software and everyone else was going it so they olerated the flaws of the ibm pc but at least the ibm pc got better over the years.
There's something magical the 1987-1994 period. Oddly enough, I didn't experience it directly. I lived it through several outdated 386 and 486 PCs which I had access to growing up in the late 90s. I was certainly fascinated with contemporary technological developments and lusted for the latest and greatest 3D games and hardware. Maybe it was just exposure that fostered my fondness for the early multimedia era, but I do think there was something special about that time. It seems like computers were becoming powerful enough to do cool graphics and sound, yet it was also early enough that there were still a lot of possibilities left open to the imagination. I also think there were some artful and creative ways software was made to feel much larger and more complex than it was. It seems like games in particular (think Sierra) relied heavily on imagination to supplement the play instead of creating excitement through brute force graphics. I enjoyed the 3D era, but I was always (and often still am) left wanting more realism, more interactive objects, more physics.... I don't feel that with DOS games, but again, maybe it's just a function of my age at the time and what I had at my disposal.
I think a lot of people will vote for the period from which their 'favourite' machine comes; or the period they cut their teeth. I voted for the 70s because the first large system I used (and loved) was a large Elliott 4130 in use by the RAF to drive a huge simulator. To boot it, you had to toggle in a boot loader on the front pales switches, then feed it a paper tape. If all that was successful, its washing-machine disk pack would burst into life to do the rest of the boot. It was idiosyncratic and I loved learning it. When I started on these machines (there were actually two which could be multiplexed with a cable the size of your arm) they had just (!) been upgraded from iron core memory to static RAM (you could turn them off and on and they'd carry on) and the teletype had been upgraded to a glass terminal. I graduated to minicomputers in the 90s and my first love is still for large systems. Kubernetes clusters, these days.
Kube clusters be damned! Can't beat them Blinken lights!
The computing era up until say 2000. were the best because we saw so many innovations that became the staples for today. Since then everything has become just become faster and increased graphics. During this period we went from text interfaces to graphical interfaces. 2d to 3d gaming. tube monitors to flat screen. local computing to network computing. during this time everything we saw was mind blowing and new. Everything from this era that we still use today on is basically just improving now.. so its not that exciting anymore. to me anyway. I think something that we could look forward to as the next big leap is AR technology becoming mainstream, when we can put on lightweight glasses or even contact lenes and the world as we see will be augmented with super imposed graphics, we could play FPS in the real world, see a map and our speed while we drive, basically a HUD in real life.