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16 years

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Charles Gill, Jul 21, 2009.

  1. Charles Gill

    Charles Gill

    Joined:
    Aug 1, 2008
    Posts:
    142
    16 years may seem like a lifetime to some, and quite literally is for my oldest daughter who's birthday is tomorrow.

    But something in an email my wife sent me, recounting the the last 24 hours before we went to the hospital and my daughter was born, caught my eye.

    She said I had just got home from Comp-USA with my fancy newest computer and had only just gotten it set-up before we left for the hospital.

    That computer was a bitchin 486 that I paid ~$2,500 dollars for.

    Now, I've owned a box ever since my first Sinclair ZX80, later upgraded to an Atari 800 with 8k of memory.

    But something about recounting how much has changed in just these last 16 years has me drinking the Kurweil kool-aid.

    1. Windows did not even exist, practically speaking. Windows 3.0 had been released just a few months before my daughter was born but most nerds, like me, were still using DOS and loving it. GUI's were for sissy's!

    2. Forget Google or even Yahoo. Even Netscape was a few years from existing and BBS's run by local SysOps were the mom and pop stores ignorant of the Wall-mart sized shadow cast by the coming "internet".

    3. Terminator 2 was released and minds were blown by the computer generated liquid face morphing robot and Jurassic Park was still a year away from proving that traditional special effects (a la Dark Crystal and Willow) were dead.

    4. I suppose the super-NES was still the console of choice, since the Playstation was still a few years from changing everything. Video-games, in general, had been dead since the 86 crash and seemed like they had only begun to re-surface, but I was not really in that loop anymore.

    Not going to wax anymore nostalgic; and it's not really nostalgia to begin with.

    My generation grew up under the shadow of a mushroom cloud, but my daughter grows up under the shadow of an iPod. A world of instantly accessible, immediately disposable and totally integrated technology.

    My generation was Tienanmen Square; her's is Twitter in Tehran.

    Amazing.

    Charles
     
  2. beezir

    beezir

    Joined:
    Apr 3, 2009
    Posts:
    133
    That takes me back. My first computer was an Atari 800, and I'd pop in the BASIC cartridge and program silly games for hours on that thing. When the original NES came out, it looked like magic to me and I loved it.

    16 years ago I joined into the world of Sysops by setting up a small BBS called Big Chuck's Burger Joint. It had somewhere around 50 local users and was hand-coded since I didn't like the interface of the other free software. Sadly it was never popular enough to be remembered by Google. :D That was also my first experience with trolls... a self-proclaimed hacker started by telling me he would hack into my system and explode my CPU to melt my "black heart" if I didn't give him admin access. Later he told me he'd help find security holes in the system. So I put a bunch of fake ones in to entertain him. He never caught on that he wasn't really getting into my DOS prompt.

    I'm still amazed when I go back and look at some of the early CG effects in movies. They looked so real at the time, but now they look so obvious. It's weird what years of exposure to CG will do.

    Anyway, congrats on 16 years. Guess it's time to start being nervous about her driving all the time, eh? My oldest just turned 4, and I can't imagine what the world will be like by the time she's 16. Though I bet there won't be flying cars still. :wink:
     
  3. galent

    galent

    Joined:
    Jan 7, 2008
    Posts:
    1,078
    Ahh, I love flash back posts :D

    The first home computer I ever laid eyes on was a Vic 20, followed quickly by the TRS80.

    Yes much has changed, and by the same token remained the same. True machines are much faster with infinitely more memory, and yet we still find ways to clog up both to the point where the actual "game" or "app" still only has 64K of ram and a couple of CPU cycles left to play with :D

    Our children do have a different perspective of the world than we did. Hopefully all this information will help them make it better :)

    Congratulations on the 16th birthday! (if you survive the next 4 years you've earned the right to retire ;) )

    Galen
     
  4. nickavv

    nickavv

    Joined:
    Aug 2, 2006
    Posts:
    1,801
    16 years ago I was still an infant, but hey, I can have flashbacks too dammit. :p

    My first computer was a PowerComputing Mac clone, running System 7.5, but before that I had been using my parents computers to get online for a long time. We used Netscape Navigator and had dial-up internet and one-button mice.
     
  5. Jessy

    Jessy

    Joined:
    Jun 7, 2007
    Posts:
    7,325
    Man, this makes me think of my girlfriend's 16th birthday. Computing was the last thing on our minds. 8)

    Still together, 11 years later, with a son, who is a cat. :D

    Ah to be the dad of a human! Can't imagine it! :eek:
     
  6. Charles Gill

    Charles Gill

    Joined:
    Aug 1, 2008
    Posts:
    142
    @Jessy: You write "Computing was the last thing on our minds" and then put a smiley face with shades. I interpret that emoticon to mean "we were discussing Eastern philosophy, J.R.R Tolkein and X-Files", to which I nod approvingly. Ahem.

    Seriously, 11 years is impressive. If kids are in your future, you will be awesome.

    @Beezir: I remember my wife walking through the kitchen just as the SysOp of my local BBS started an online chat with me. My wife had never really paid attention to it (it was a philosophy BBS) but the idea that I was typing back and forth to someone really blew her mind.

    My earliest BBS was in the mid-80s. For some reason I adopted the handle Grazz't Freebile and I was the ultimate truculent troll, inserting myself into a.p.o style debates with sophist iniquity.

    @galent: I still have a middle daughter and younger son, so there are "miles to go before I sleep", as it were. In the strictest sense I'm not sure there has been a qualitative change in PCs since multi-tasking was built into the CPU / OS, but they are certainly faster. I think what I struggle with most are the social impacts of consumable technology. Anyone with an iPhone and google is already, somewhat, an android.

    @Nick: The Colbert Report recently did a satire of computers from 1998, complete with dial-up access to AOL Online, and my children asked me "what is that wierd sound?" and I laughed and said, "that's a carrier signal!".

    Ah, to think of 300 BPS modems with acoustic couplers to rotary phones!

    I must stop, lest I sound like a wistful Luddite.

    Charles
     
  7. Jessy

    Jessy

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    Jun 7, 2007
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    I don't appreciate the fact that you spied on us, but I applaud your infallible memory!

    That happened to me, too, when I saw my friend doing it c. 1991, using Prodigy. :eek: My family's computer at that point was still a Commodore 64.

    I prefer "cyborg", but I agree with you. And I personally hope it's just a gateway to implants that improve our sensory perception.
     
  8. Alec

    Alec

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    1,330
    I didn't exist 16 years ago.
     
  9. artzfx

    artzfx

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    Apr 28, 2008
    Posts:
    572
    LOL.. nice one.
     
  10. SarperS

    SarperS

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    Mar 10, 2009
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    824
    16 years ago I was playing Barbarian with my brother on our Commodore 64...I was 5 :) It was the first game I've ever played, explains why I love the medieval and barbarian stuff so much.

    My parents bought my first pc when I was 9 I guess, it was 1997. I had a Pentium Celeron 400, I remember playing Blood, Duke Nukem 3D and some other old classics on it. Before that pc, I was using my bro's computers (C64, Amiga, and my fathers office comp. which had Win 3.1. I remember playing Moonstone, Raptor, Doom 1-2, Diablo, Budokan, Paperboy, Warcraft 1-2, Red Alert, Rise of the Triad etc. from my childhood...

    Best years of my gaming life :) Oh and I started my developer journey in 1994, when I was 6, my brother bought a Klik'n'Play, ClickTeam's first drag'n'drop game dev. suite.
     
  11. yellowlabrador

    yellowlabrador

    Joined:
    Oct 20, 2005
    Posts:
    562
    16 yrs. ago part of him was with his Father and part of him was with his Mom.

    So 16 yrs ago, you partially exist Alec. :wink:
     
  12. Alec

    Alec

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    1,330
    dam you....
     
  13. G3David

    G3David

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    Oct 1, 2007
    Posts:
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    lol, he half-existed, his sperm hadnt been made yet...heh
     
  14. Charles Hinshaw

    Charles Hinshaw

    Joined:
    Feb 6, 2008
    Posts:
    1,070
    Ok... so summer of 1993. If I'm doing the math correctly, this was the first amateur level design that I ever did -- for Wolfenstein 3D -- and it really sucked. I *might* have let a few friends see it, but it wasn't anything playable.

    For programming (unrelated to level editing), I was probably using QBasic at the time because I think that was also the summer that I switched to using line labels and while loops and that switch blew my 12-year-old mind.

    I'm pretty sure that I was still using a 386 that summer. I went from that to a Pentium shortly after it was released. I guess it would have been possible to have had a P5 that summer (I think it was released in the spring), but I sort of recall getting it in the middle of winter. That timeline makes sense because that winter Doom was released. It wouldn't be until the next year that level editors and other tools were available to make custom WADs for it and until then, I didn't have much of an excuse to use a BBS until then (to distribute what I was doing.) That makes that summer the last summer where I was officially "offline" (in a sense)
     
  15. spacefrog

    spacefrog

    Joined:
    Jun 14, 2009
    Posts:
    734
    16 yrs. ago i quit my job as computer field/service engineer and started to study software engineering (i was 25 then). I did 3D on my Amiga since 1988/89 (Sculpt3D / Turbosilver, Videoscape - if anyone remembers...) and of course i played a lot of the great Amiga Games.

    Though it all started with my ZX Spectrum in 1984 (48KB ) - i still own it and I found the bill for it recently in my parents attic (see attachment)

    this again reminds me on Atic Atac, or Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy or The Hobbit, later i tried to code some Pacman in pure assembler code, got to some stage but then i lost the interest in it....

    oh well - things have REALLY gone a loooong way since then and gaming changed pretty much ....
     

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