Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day.
Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty more. Life’s a trip.
Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.
I created my first program on punch cards in '79. I can't even remember what the programming language was although I suspect FORTRAN. I wish I'd kept a listing.
Tangentially, my valued copy of The Lord of the Rings that I loved as a child has the date 'Christmas 1973' inside the front cover. I'm going to read it again this Christmas, 50 years later. I've been avoiding anything Tolkien-related since about 2017, when I last re-read it (and noticed the upcoming anniversary), to come to it as fresh as possible, accepting that I know the story backwards.
When you were typing in '89, I was on a mainframe in college.
I do not enjoy that one of the defining moments of my adult life -- 9/11, which happened when I was 31 -- is now long enough ago that there are adults who do not or literally COULD not remember it. Time marches on.
Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)
It has been a useful tool for finding specific knowledge and skills, but I would say that there is no "treasure" on the internet.
Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world.
That's romantic, but why would it be true, unless you just define treasure as something that you find in real life? Specific knowledge and skills are not treasure?
I'm curious if you lived before the days of having so much knowledge instantly accessible, practically for free.
A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.
In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high and required a lot of dedication and problem-solving abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping malls, and time-share condos.
A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo.
Why?
> what is currently purported to be the 'golden age'
My guess is that we’re on it right now.
Once something is past this 'recency' window, we may want to start looking into additional examples more reflective of current times. That is not to say the Digg exodus is an insignificant event, but that there have been a fair few exodi since--StackExchange, Twitter's infosec sphere, streamers between YouTube/Twitch, Snap/Tiktok, failed SVOD services.
HN might be one of the lucky few around.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0474-5
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22447690/link-rot-researc...
The internet is useful when you need some specific knowledge. It is useless when you need nothing and are just browsing. Sitting there watching TikTok videos or reading hackernews is usually going to turn out to be a waste of time.
Similar era at least: Po Bronson - The Nudist on the Late Shift ... and other tales of Silicon Valley (1999)
"Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.
- Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier
I’m young enough that I don’t have any personal knowledge of the time period to compare it with, so maybe I’m missing a nostalgia angle.
I don’t doubt that it is a great book, it just didn’t grab me for whatever reason.
It's an alluring tale and appeals to the technologist in all of us old enough to feel nostalgic about a lost time, especially as the internet and then the web has become used by a broader swath of the population. I have a successful uncle who tells us stories about how calculators and CAD dumbed down engineering and only his ilk of paper calculations and slide rule approximation can truly engineer.
I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?
It makes me want to schedule a nightly kill of slack.exe lest it become too attached to it’s worldview of my audio devices.
A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a talk given by Whitfield Diffie:
> We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.
Other memoirs by people who worked in computing and became disillusioned or dissatisfied with it:
Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)
Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (1995)
Neither is all memoir like Ullman's book -- both are mostly exposition and argument. But both have some passages of memoir, and in both the author's personality shows through clearly throughout.
- Soul Of A New Machine: Tracy Kidder
The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective, messy working contexts, filled with deadlines, bureaucracy, "rockstars"...
Her takes on the internet are also super relevant today. A favorite extract of mine: "When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria — if only they could figure out how to use it. But they just sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them".
What other similar books would you recommend?