About twenty years ago I was trolling around the Internet explaining how Microsoft was going to screw over IBM and OS/2. I went by melling back then too:<p><a href="http://www.skytel.co.cr/advocacy/research/1991/0817.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.skytel.co.cr/advocacy/research/1991/0817.html</a><p>And for hacking fun, I was enamored with Steve Jobs' NeXT computer. Among other things, I worked on the Tetris port:<p><a href="http://www.artizia.com/tetris/contributors.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.artizia.com/tetris/contributors.html</a><p>A year later, I found my first developer job via the Internet and ended up in the NYC area. About a year out of college I bought a used 386 computer, got Linux running and a PPP connection, then I was back on the Internet.<p>Today, the Internet is just bigger and faster, while Steve's NeXT computer fits in your front shirt pocket.
> We played <i>outside</i> (there was nothing to do inside anyway)<p>Having happily spent hours playing with the dirt under a bush in my front yard with Star Wars action figures when I was young, lost in my imagination, aided by props, I lament the complete shift that has occurred for many kids. It's a sea change, and I was ecstatic recently when my toddler niece played in the dirt on my watch - only got caught because she got dirt on her cheeks - I hope she never loses that curiousity - her parents were away...<p>Now my nephews - my sister has successfully resisted the introduction of video games for at least six years - hope she can continue to fight. For when the video game console gets in, it will change expectations forever.
20 years ago today people were very scared about what was about to happen to the Middle East. This was about two weeks before the first Gulf War erupted, and a lot of people thought (correctly) that Iraq would try to drag Israel into it.<p>I remember two technological developments that year: I saw email for the first time at the Boston public broadcaster WGBH, and one of the larger American airlines installed phones in the backs of economy seats (I still see them every now and then, but don't think they work anymore). The calls were expensive as hell.<p>Some people had car phones, and "beepers" had spread out from professional occupations to youth culture (the Tribe Called Quest song "Sky Pager" references this) but I did not know anyone who had a mobile phone in the US in 1990. I saw my first mobile phone in London in 1991.<p>GUIs were very widespread on campuses, but there were still a surprising amount of command-line based software being used in the workplace. At one of my first jobs at a UK record label in 1991 they had me using Word Perfect (?) which involved green text on a black screen, and lots of keyboard shortcuts. Aside from the email example mentioned earlier, every business I dealt with in 1990-1991 used faxes or the post to send documents.<p>EDIT: added beeper/mobile phone/GUI/fax recollections
A few odd couple short of 20 years ago, but nevertheless, Linux was a new wonder to me. Red Hat CDs came packaged with issues of a computer magazine. This was in India. 7 KB/sec was fast, and it lasted a burst or two per day. Was absolutely new to programing. Wrote a p2p service for sharing rpm packages, because downloading them from upstream was so slow. Wrote it in TCL, it went nowhere. But a few snippets of that code found its way into the tcl library.<p>Laser printers were a frightfully expensive piece of equipment and wasting toner bothered me. So went through ghostscript code to realize for the first time how beautiful code can truly be. Patched a part of the driver to handle economy mode.<p>Had it not been for FSF and open-source, I would perhaps have never learned programming. I did not major in CS, but for those who did, without FSF it would have been unaffordable.
Hmm.. I'm not that old (I'm 23) and a lot of this stuff was also normal when I was a kid. I wonder if things are <i>that</i> different for 8 year olds now (the stuff about being a kid and getting into trouble, I mean).<p>I had to dress up to go to church.<p>From the time I can remember forward, the rule was that I just had to be home...eventually. I couldn't actually spend the <i>night</i> in the woods, but I could explore them to my heart's content.<p>I rode my bicycle <i>everywhere</i>. I rode my bike to school starting the summer of 4th grade, 3 miles each way down a highway and through town, but I didn't even get killed a little bit.
<i>If you wanted to know something, there was no Google or Wikipedia. You might be able to find out a basic fact if you had a set of encyclopedias. But most information, from important stuff to basic trivia ("who was in that movie?") was not available unless you had a reference book or went to the library and really searched.</i><p>Rumors, lies, media manipulation, thwarted by a few seconds of research. If more people bothered, it would be a better world.<p>Off topic, but obligatory Monty Python piece <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo</a>
What's the "20 years go" bit about? It's not in TFA's title.<p>Twenty years ago was (late) 1990, not $700 VCRs, no video games, or people kicked off of airplanes for wearing sweatpants.
> No Facebook or email. Long distance calling was expensive... Sundays were the days to call family and friends, because rates were cheaper.<p>I remember as a kid being told by my father to go play somewhere else, because I was bothering my mother who was on the phone <i>long distance.</i><p>Even when I went to college in 1999, I remember it being an issue since not everyone's cell plan featured long distance included, but everyone came with a cell phone that had a number local to their hometown. People would end up racking up long distance charges on their cell phones just to call a friend in the next building over.<p>Thought: mobile data charges are the next generation's "long distance" (or are at least headed that way).
The original poster is talking about way more than 20 years ago, as far as I can tell. It looks like his items cover a range, going as far back as 40 or 50 years ago, up to about 10 years ago.
" People lined up at banks on Fridays, to deposit their paychecks and withdraw cash for the weekend. If you ran out of cash over the weekend, too bad."<p>Not in 1990, that's for sure. Heck, in _1981_ we had ATMs all over my small town of Vernon, BC. Wikipedia (which _wasn't_ around in 1990, and I would sorely miss) tells me the first ATMs came into the United states around 1969 - and browsing through that article, the appear to be fairly common by 1975)
Aww, I remember the outside.<p>Seriously though, I'm grateful to my brother who's kept my nephews on a strict time limit and filter when it comes to TV and video games. They play outside and put their amazing imaginations to use.
You don't even have to be that old to remember most of that. Except for milk deliveries, well-dressed for airplane trips, and a few other things on there I remember how things were...<p>If you think about it, it's all before super cheap labor/parts from China, not just a technological gap.<p>One of my more earlier memories is standing in line for Star Wars. It went clear around a building or two and as a child it was the most spectacular thing to see that many people in a row.<p>Oh and I remember being given a nickel to buy a bagel. Damn I've gotten old :-(
This article is mostly only relevant to people under 20.<p>In my opinion, the real generation gap begins close to the current age of 22. People 22 or younger very likely had the internet in Elementary schools, a computer before they entered middle school (probably with the internet), video systems with 3D accelerators, broadband before they got out of high school, and Wikipedia for the entirety of their college career, among other things.
The nostalgia in this article really bothers me, in some ways. Maybe I'm just oversensitive, but it just seems like there's a lot of unacknowedged white male bias. Where are the women talking about how incredibly sexist everyday society was, or the black people talking about open, shameless racism?<p>I am about to take off on a plane so I don't have much else to say, but this was really bothering me.
About 25 to 30 years ago:<p>- I got my first computer: an Atari 400 computer with 16k of RAM and no storage, so I would write a program and then just turn it off. The OS and a BASIC interpreter also fit in that 16k so it wasn't hard to write a program that would be too big to fit into memory.<p>- The APPLE ][ was a spark of pure genius. The first time I played with it, it changed my life. I would walk a couple miles to the computer store on weekends so I could work on one. (I rememeber the Lisa and then Macintosh coming out and somehow not being impressed.)<p>- Software piracy was rampant. Software was sold through publishers, like books.<p>- Elephant memory was the cool makers of floppy disks. I had this big poster in my room: <a href="http://home.comcast.net/~kevin_d_clark/ems/ems-mag-ad-2-small.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://home.comcast.net/~kevin_d_clark/ems/ems-mag-ad-2-smal...</a><p>- My first modem was 300 baud. That was so slow, it took a second or so for each character to appear.
20 years ago today, I was getting ready to head back to my final semester of my undergrad in CompSci. I had just completed my last course that used the IBM 370 with Modula-2 (the base language for UND at the time). The Internet for me was mostly mailing lists and USENET. I so wanted a NeXT cube but there was no way I could afford it. My last papers were completed on a Mac SE/30. No class I had touched a GUI. The one class that had Lisp was a nightmare because the VAX had too little memory so the REPL became batch processing with 2 or more students working at the same time. The only computer I bought was an Atari 130xe to replace my old 400, and all it was used for was electronic fun with the joystick/paddle ports (or the occasional MULE game).
I made a database for my LP's (and maybe a CD or two) in Turbo Pascal on my dad's laptop. Yes, he had a laptop. It was a Compaq with a 386DX20 and a grayscale screen. I didn't really know any sorting algorithms so I came up with the world's worst bubblesort. I think it was O(n³), possibly O(n⁴).<p>Note: my memory is a bit fuzzy, this might have happened anywhere from 1990-1993.
Almost everything in this discussion can be simulated by not having digital appliances: No instant communications, photos, information, banking, trade, or travel.<p>Basically:<p>You had to be more diligent when taking care of business;
You had to be clean when going places (no pajamas on a plane);
There was no bull<i></i><i></i> security theatre when travelling;
There were fewer distractions for children.