Ask HN: 70s and 80s were the golden days of computing?
I love that era because we knew in our bones there was something more to computing than IBM mainframes, but we hadn&#x27;t built it yet.  AND we didn&#x27;t know enough to know what the limitations of microcomputing and telecommunications might be.  Someone might pipe up and say something like &quot;in the future, I&#x27;ll be able to download any song by any artist!&quot; and we would laugh and then realize it was possible.  But this was before we understood the economic constraints that limit music streaming to a pretty pitiful subset of what&#x27;s available.  I mean sure, you can download any Katy Perry song you want, but it would be cool if I could get the ACTUAL Ministry or Smiths recordings from the 80s instead of later remixes or re-recordings.<p>And we were idealists, we has snorted Adam Smith as undergrads and emerged as utopian libertarians.  We had yet to understand the role of tech isn&#x27;t first to provide a service, but to make a banker some money.  If we could stream the album version of &quot;low spark of high-heeled boys&quot; we could repeat the line about how the man in the suit just bought a new car on the profits he made on your dreams.  I guess we can stream it off youtube, but there&#x27;ll be ads involved.  There is no free market utopia here, just a never ending stream of rent seekers.<p>And speaking of rent seeking, what did we do to be saddled with the &quot;philosophical technical debt&quot; of the block-chain.  Decades later and we&#x27;re still looking for a killer app for it.  Imagine a world where our young engineers said something other than HODL HODL HODL in job interviews. (this is a joke, they sometimes also say &quot;red black tree&quot; in interviews.)<p>The late 70s &#x2F; early 80s was a time when our capabilities were starting to match our dreams.  Not so much that new things were possible, but that they were affordable.  Putting a real computing device on someone&#x27;s desktop for under $1000 was revolutionary.  And we got a flood of new peripherals and software.  You could buy a mouse for your IBM PC in 1982 and the Apple Lisa showed us a vision of what might be.<p>Suddenly, every weird bit of tech was becoming affordable.<p>But in the 90s we found a set of peripherals we liked: lcd screen, crappy keyboard, decent CPU, but most importantly, 802.11b.  Hardware innovation shifted into &quot;cost reduced mode.&quot;  No one would fund funky peripherals just because they were funky and cool.  (Side note... the first voice recognition system I used was on a TI 99&#x2F;4 in 1981)<p>And I would argue the 90s was a great time to be a software engineer.  Old dogmas were falling left and right.  Java was new and hadn&#x27;t yet been festooned with XML turds and every language feature a 21 year old Stanford CS grad could want.<p>But it was also the rise of python... huge monoliths of functionality you didn&#x27;t dare try to modify.  Sussman commented that in the old days we made complex systems from simple systems.  Now we&#x27;re given complex monoliths and we spend our time devising experiments to figure out how they work (since the documentation is NEVER complete.)  I think he was talking about Python, but the same thing holds double for Machine Learning.<p>The 80s was the heyday of data structure and algorithmic research, now we just use hash maps (when I interviewed at Amazon, my interviewer, a recent CS grad couldn&#x27;t remember what a linked list was and the last time I was on StackFault, it was a bunch of people laughing at the old guys for declaring data structures that ended in one byte character arrays.)<p>Yes, I&#x27;m old.  Old enough to remember when the MCP was just a chess program.<p>When was the last time you met a kid in a Computer Science curriculum who was just plain interested in computing?  They&#x27;re all in it cause they heard you could bank coin as a software engineer.  I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s not true, but the ones that are in it for the money are drowning out the ones that have legit intellectual curiosity.<p>But can you blame them?  You go to Stanford or ucb, get a CS degree and immediately progress to getting your first round of funding for... what?  Dating on the block chain? Rideshare for bicyclists?  When I was your age I was writing systems to control nuclear power plants.  We did not use Agile.  We wrote a lot of tests.<p>All is not doom and gloom though, I am happy to report I meet a lot of young people with a legit ambition to make the world a better place.  But it&#x27;s sometimes hard to see them through all the chaff.<p>I think there&#x27;s just as much gold in the 2010&#x27;s and 2020&#x27;s, it&#x27;s just that it&#x27;s a lot harder to see with all the horseshit.<p>But dig through it.  You&#x27;ll eventually find your pony.