I love some misconceptions about technology or the way of living in the 80s / 90s.
An anecdote I love is a young scholar asking his teacher:
Before you had internet, how did you access Wikipedia?
A friend's young son asked him how people got online back in the days before computers were invented.
"About sixty years ago, there were only about seven different web sites, and none of them had any user interaction or even navigation. They just autoplayed the same scheduled streamed video to everyone who looked at them, all the time, like a YouTube autoplay you can't turn off. If you wanted to talk to the YTer, you'd have to do a realtime voice chat, or send them a DM on a piece of paper, and they usually wouldn't even answer. There were also podcasts - more of them than websites - and these were mostly also only sent once and couldn't be listened to again. If you tried to voicechat the podcasts, they would often respond, and might even talk to you live on the podcast. Since there were so few podcasts you'd probably listen to the same ones as your friends, so there was a chance they'd even hear you talking on the podcast."
This isn't my usual kind of post, and this isn't the sort of thing that usually survives here on HN, but I saw this and immediately thought of the genuine generation gap I sometimes see here.
I remember coding in BASIC on a TRS-80, smashing the stack to get to machine code[0], writing my own monitor program and assembler, then a compiler in BASIC from BASIC direct to Z80.
The story of Mel[1] is real, and I really do think people should have the opportunity to see how things were, and recognise that things now are AMAZING !!!
[0] Not even assembler
> Apparently, kids these days know little about the hardships of life.
Everyone's a kid to someone else. I remember being told some stories when my beard was already white and genuinely wondering if they were true or not just because my personal experience had stories that were just as crazy for someone just 10 years younger.
> because my personal experience had stories that were just as crazy for someone just 10 years younger
That's why programmers often like to call themselves wizards. We do things that are even unimaginable to other people. I recently got a surprised "Wow, is that even possible?" comment about a weekend project made for fun.
Your weekend project was probably very creative but not "you're pulling my leg, this can't be for real".
Technology is complicated and only getting more so. Even a tech savvy person can be surprised by something new in tech. Some techniques that can be used to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped system could still sound crazy or leave you surprised. But it's a different kind of surprise, not that you can't believe it's real, more that you can't believe someone thought of using it that way, or that tech evolved to the point the thing became possible.
I was thinking more of stories like this one [0]. Sounded exactly like a story used to bamboozle young'uns until I realized it's actually true. Stories from behind the iron curtain told to people from the other side of it sometimes sound equally crazy even without the generation gap. A cultural/societal gap is enough.
The newegg comment is subtle and well done. It's just silly enough and yet believable enough to make you wonder.
It was terrible if you were struggling in college and had to choose between using the mouse that day or eating.