• Joe
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    4 days ago

    Grey-stubble Gen-X’er here… The 80s and (moreso for me) 90s were a great time to get into tech. Amiga, DOS, Win3.11, OS/2, Linux… BBS’s and the start of the Internet, accompanied by special interest groups and regular in-person social events.

    Everyone was learning at the same time, and the complexity arrived in consumable chunks.

    Nowadays, details are hidden behind touchscreens and custom UXs, and the complexity must seem insurmountable to many. I guess courses have more value now.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Basically everybody making a game for Amiga made the equivalent of their own graphics drivers. Programming direct to the specialized hardware, and M68000 assembly was so easy and intuitive it was a joy to use.
      But that way of programming apps is completely obsolete today. Now it’s all about abstraction layers. And for a guy like me, it feels like I lost control.
      If you want to program “old school” you have to play with things like Arduino.
      I’m a relic now, that’s just how it is.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          My wife actually used that for something she needed to be able to remote control a few years back. She tells me it an amazing chip. 😀

          • Valmond@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            Wow cool!

            Yes it’s one of the most cheapest and amazing chips but also not very known about, or so I feel.

            I made a little webserver on it that polled a site I had, so that I could switch (ok, only a led but still) on and off both from the esp and the website. Quite capable little chip.

      • Joe
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        3 days ago

        Hah. I was just playing a YT video of modem sounds for my son, after showing him some “history” videos about early PCs, BBS’s, text adventure and early commodore* and PC gaming.

        History? I lived it, son.