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Do you remember sitting in front of the black and green?
The modem screaming into the void of the unrisen future?
The first time you found this new world?
When was the last time you felt that kind of wonder?
@TheGibson i am old. I grew up in the world you described. I didn’t know it as any manifesto, it was just 075.txt in the Jolly Roger, or “Mentors last words” I used to take the train into my local 2600 meet.
I work in DevOps now. It pays bills but my love for it has been… hard to find at times.
A few years back i wandered into the dark sky areas of the northern Arizona desert on the Colorado plateau, and on a moonless night I looked up and saw the Milky Way spinning lazily overhead, accompanied by a sky so full of stars one could see no black.
I am no ludite, but the last time I was truly excited about a computer, it gave me access to a world denied to me. Now that I am older and have all the access I want and more, what excites me the most, is putting it down.
@jbarros @thegibson I feel this in my bones.
I grew up in front of my C64. I spent my teenage years in front of my Amiga. Demoparties, all-night hackery sessions, weird coding projects all driven by passion and wonder. The late 90s were magic - the internet had so much promise.
I work in embedded dev. I'm happy with my job - but it's a *job*. I don't feel the way about computing I used to - mostly, modern computing (as defined by Big Tech) just makes me miserable. A grotesque money trench crawling with the worst people in the world. I feel like all the promise is gone - the new promise is only about exploiting, extracting and enclosing, and replacing a bunch of people with shitty robots.
When the world was rough and I needed to escape, I used to fire up the computer and put my head into some thorny programming problem (often of dubious utility). Now, I arrange bonsai, read books and largely wish I lived in a wooden cabin far from the long claws of Silicon Valley.
@datarama @jbarros @thegibson
"Now, one day back at Data General, his weariness focused on the logic analyzer and the small catastrophes that come from trying to build a machine that operates in billionths of a second. On this occasion, he went away from his basement and left this note on his terminal:"
"I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
-- Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine
@dec23k @datarama @jbarros @thegibson Fun fact: Tom West (not this guy, but in this book) was my dad and I now live in Vermont. #proper
@jessamyn
You're way too modest. :-)
(edit: Your reply, taken out of context of the book, reads like your Dad was just some other guy who was at Data General at the same time)
@dec23k 
I honestly think the most important technology lesson I got from him was that computers are tools to help you do other things not an end in and of themselves. I grew up thinking computers were basically normal (unusual for my generation) but at the same time we didn't have one at home.