Tech nostalgia
This post was originally published on my previous site, kohlio.com, on August 6, 2019. This may or may not have been edited slightly by AI.
I grew up as part of the generation first exposed to things like video game consoles and home computers.
Floppy disks for the Commodore 64 were a window into pixelized stories, interactive adventures like Maniac Mansion, and sequences of beepy notes constructing music that only vaguely resembled tunes like the theme songs of Rocky and Cheers. Games on Atari were magic, first the console, then the laptops. Playing text adventures in low light on my dad’s state of the art Tandy.
Wrote my first few lines of code in BASIC on that Commodore’s blue and white block letters. Felt like a hacking god creating and destroying directories and files in DOS. Felt like a true surfer hearing that modem beep and crackle Netscape into life. Doom and Duke Nukem sailed pirated ships into my nightly after-school time with PCs that were getting better and better. “Pentium, OMG!” And then, making music with now-archaic DAWs and MIDI and sequencers, editing video despite an eternity of rendering.
The ‘holy crap’ transition from Yahoo to Gmail. Making four-track songs using a smartphone. The first time I crunched through a huge data set with a Python script. Fond but distant recollections of booting up Windows 95, the nightmares of Vista, and the fresh and clean feeling of Windows 10. The annoyance of Microsoft updates.
Finally, the move to Linux and never looking back. Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Manjaro, oh my. Hands on with the command line and loving every minute of actually trusting my operating system. Like maintaining a home, rather than living in somebody else’s hotel.