Pink Floyd have this line in Time :"It's always the same, in a relative way, but you're older".
It is like that. 10 years goes by like it's nothing. When you're young time is gentle on you, you don't notice it much. But once you reach your twenties, the pace is quickening.
Before you know it, you'll be 34, like me.
But by Gods, no! Computing wasn't ugly back then! Don't forget that these computers were the hip new thing. I mean, home computers kicked in around 1980, the Commodore 64 around 1982. Before that, NO ONE had a computer. And even then, only some started to pick up this new thing at first, these home computers. Geeks, nerds they called them. Little did the common man know that these computers were going to take over the world. They would move in and settle in everybody's lives permanently, even if they protested. I was 8 when I first got my own homecomputer, a Commodore VIC20, and class mates just barely understood what I was doing. But I could play cool games, and program stuff! Then I met some other class mates that also had computers and we'd hook up and hang out together, playing games, program stuff, talk 8-bit etc. When in the scene we were swapping software and our own creations by snail mail ! We'd copy our stuff onto many floppydisks and send those to our contacts. It felt to us we were living at the front line of technology. It was exiting, new, and fresh. Then we could connect via telephone lines to a Bulletin Board System and a new world opened.
We often dreamed that it would be wonderful, if we could talk to others instantly, by typing on the keyboard, wouldn't that be great?
People that looked upon us as nerds will at some point have realised that in fact we were not at all. Indeed, recent studies have shown that people that started as computerfreaks back in the day, were more popular and succesful people in later life (their thirties), compared to people of the same age that were afraid to touch these computers when they were young.
Of course, then usenet came on and then internet and the rest is history.
But computing was exiting, fun, and great back then, not at all ugly. Check out some of my friends at
http://noname.c64.org/csdb There you will find people in their 30s, 40s and 50s that are still at it. The C64 scene is not dead. How's that for a computer that has long since been obsolete. It's because it was such a brilliant time, that you become attached to it. Interestingly, I've seen teens join the scene each year, which goes to show that even those that grew up with PC, Nintendo, PS etc still were attracted to the C64 !
Ah yes...
