I was having a chat with the new PhD student at work today and ended up reminiscing about the arcana of US Robotic S-Registries, why QEMM-386 was an evil, evil piece of software and why the assembly demo scene was inherently cool and elegant. He hadn’t heard about any of this. Don’t get me wrong. Having seemingly unlimited amounts of computing power and resources is a good thing. Being able to download HD video at gigabit speeds is a very good thing. There is a feeling of rose-tinted nostalgia about being in my parents’ basement trying to get my very first PC to boot windows 3.1 with enough base RAM available to start Wolfenstein or to get my modem init string to the point where I could squeeze out those last few bauds to download porn that little much quicker :)
Life was more frustrating, if simpler, back then :)