Tech not-a-meme
Mar. 21st, 2018 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livLots of people have filled in the meme about when they got online, when they had access to particular technology, etc. I think the meme isn't very well constructed, but the subject is interesting and I'm enjoying reading everybody else's posts. So I'll just babble about the topic, rather than answering the questions directly.
Part of why this is interesting is that I'm of the exact micro-generation who came of age just when internet access became straightforwardly available. Lots of people have written books about growing up middle class in the UK in the 80s and 90s, and the amazing impact of the tech revolution, and I know I'm nothing special, but still, it's a big part of my culture and personality.
When I was a kid, we had a home computer, an Acorn Electron at first, then a BBC Micro. They were expensive, the sort of thing that relied on having relatively financially comfortable and enlightened parents. But having a computer at home did us so much good. I think the reason we were fortunate with this is partly because one of my dad's closest friends was a programmer during an era when that was a highly unusual job, and therefore had a good vantage point to see that providing children with a microcomputer would be useful. Also Dad himself was working in telecommunications and keeping abreast of technological change, and we had a cousin a couple of years older who got quite into computers and I think our high-end BBC was a cast-off from him.
Yes, we played a lot of games – I remember the frustration of loading them from tape, which was not only slow but desperately unreliable. The thing is, playing games in the 80s was seriously educational; we would look at what would now be called the source code and understand how the games worked, and modify it to make the games easier or even just to personalize the in-game messages. Only one company, Superior Software, protected their code beyond the ability of under 10s to break in. We also did a lot of typing in programs from magazines, and debugging them, and again, modifying them in minor ways so it wasn't just mindless recipe following.
There was some access to similar computers at primary school; we did Logo programming to control a robot turtle, and played Granny's Garden, and sometimes I was left to play on the computer when the rest of the class were learning stuff I was too advanced for. It was a bit of a gimmick, though, having a computer at home was much more valuable. At one point my brother and I attended a 'programming club' which I remember as being really quite sleazy: it was held in the graffiti-covered, smoke-smelling basement of some local council building, and run by two middle-aged men who made a big deal out of being peripherally connected to the exciting bits of the emerging video games scene. Most of the other students were teenagers and a bit older than us. We learned quite a bit about how to structure programs sensibly, and worked on a giant sprawling text adventure thing.
Secondary school largely put me off taking programming any further, though. My school was incredibly snobby about computers, considering them as little more than fancy typewriters, and we were repeatedly discouraged from having too much to do with them as "you'll end up as nothing more than a secretary". It wasn't that girls can't program, it was that high flying intellectuals and future leaders, as we were expected to aspire to, don't bother with all that computing stuff. People who weren't predicted top grades at GCSE were sometimes nudged into taking IT as a kind of easy option. There was one IT teacher who was pretty good, but she was really frustrated by a system that saw computers as a last-ditch option for academic strugglers. Her male colleague, much more respected because sexism, was a bit of a lech and ended up in a relationship with one of the sixth formers who decided she quite liked the attention. I think it was about as consensual as a "relationship" between a teacher and student can be; they got married a couple of years after she finished school. Anyway, in this rather unpromising context, very much slanted towards IT rather than actual programming, I learned a bit of word processing and spreadsheets, and got access to some of the early PCs, pre-Microsoft, I think they might have been Acorn or RISC. And the good IT teacher did at one point introduce us to newsgroups, though we weren't allowed to look at anything in the
At home we had inherited Dad's cast-off Apple Mac from work, which started me out on a lifelong antipathy to all things Apple. Unlike the BBC Micro or even the PCs we used at school, you couldn't get 'under the hood' at all, which I hated. And there weren't any good games (at least not at pocket money prices), so that really did end up being a fancy expensive word processor. The one game the Mac did have was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, so I incidentally learned to touch type, which has of course stood me in excellent stead. Oh, and my siblings and I saved up absolutely all the money we could get our hands on (which wasn't much, we didn't have pocket money and usually if people gave us money for birthdays or the like, it was put into a savings account for future education), to buy a Nintendo Gameboy second-hand from a schoolfriend, so that became our main gaming console. I didn't really keep up with the programming after I was about 10 or 11, which is one of my major regrets now.
When I did a summer school in Israel in 1995, I discovered the proto-internet, chatrooms and message boards and more Usenet (with no teacher forbidding access to the interesting bits of it). I learned quickly that answering 'A/S/L' truthfully with 16/f/anything was a very, very bad idea. Even so, the discovery that networked computers were a relatively safe way to talk to interesting strangers all round the world was really quite important to me.
My parents gave me a desktop computer to take to uni in 1997. It was expected to be a stand-alone machine, meant for writing essays. Having been given a taste of the online world I spent a lot of time in the college computer room keeping in touch with pre-university friends by email and instant messenger (primarily ICQ, at the time, also Unix
The year just after me, the university started providing webmail accounts rather than relying on Unix for email. I didn't realize this when I met and fell instantly in love with someone in the year below me; I used the Unix directory system I was used to search for her and stay in touch, and it just so happened that she had a society account on the old system, which she rarely checked but did just happen to see my 'let's meet up again' message. The society in question was the Gilbert & Sullivan society, and so my first personally owned rather than family computer acquired the name Silver Churn, in honour of being desperately (and I assumed unrequitedly) in love with a G&S singer. (
We got dial-up at home partway through my university career, as it was clear to my parents that having internet access was necessary for both academic and social purposes. It was frustrating to move back from ethernet on tap at university, to having to wait for the phone lines to be clear, and limit use because connection time was paid by the minute, but still, having internet at home was a lot better than not.
I brought a kind of mobile phone to university, one of the classic Nokias. It was a present from my grandmother, and it meant that I could phone home without having to wait in a queue for a public phone box in the middle of the quad. It also had SMS text messages, which of course are a much more useful way of doing logistics than anything previously invented.
I never really got into things like Geocities or otherwise creating content, and for the late 90s and early 2000s mostly moved away from striking up friendships with strangers on message boards, in favour of using the internet to talk in plain text to people I knew. Lots of lonnnnnnnnnng emails tolethargic_man and MK and doseybat and others, lots of IM conversations with people who liked that kind of thing. I still wasn't programming at all; I think we did a tiny bit of Fortran in one of our practical classes, but it was very obviously just a make-work academic exercise.
I started my PhD in 2001, just at the start of the time when every scientist had their own networked computer, even lowly grad students, because otherwise you basically couldn't work. Academic journals were moving from being mostly accessed via the library and desperately photocopying reams of everything remotely relevant, to being mostly online. I got dial-up at home, and paid for unlimited access and didn't really care about tying up the landline, so I was able to continue living online. I was kind of intrigued by blogging (which was a big fad in the early 2000s), and kept dithering about starting a blog (which interested me more than making a static website), but wasn't sure what I'd write about. Then I broke up with the girlfriend who had turned out to be attracted to me after all, and she asked me to join LJ. This was in 2003, and the rest is history.
No, there's one more thing. Through LJ I got into HTML and CSS, and volunteered for Support. LJ had this whole gamified system where you could be promoted depending on how much technical support you gave, and in order to answer the highest level questions, I had to learn to at least read code and debug it, even if I wasn't exactly programming. When DW started, I joined as a volunteer helping to adapt the forked LJ codebase for the new site. This was in early 2009. My volunteering for DW has tailed off to basically nothing (my most recent patch was 2014), but I really really enjoyed working on an Open Source codebase like that and I'd like to get back into it. I'm not sure DW is the right place for me, partly because development is only just barely active.
I didn't get a smartphone until I moved back to England in 2009, and it was a dreadful Blackberry I only used because I was living in temporary accommodation with no internet at home, and not having internet access outside work was basically unbearable by then. I got my first actually useful Android phone a year or so later.
Social networking: I've tried everything that comes out, really. I'm not cutting edge, but tend to be a second wave adopter. I joined Twitter in 2007 when it was still mostly based on one-to-many SMS rather than internet. And FB also in 2007, when you needed to be able to demonstrate you were a student or graduate of a reputable university to have an account. Tumblr round about then too, way before it took off in any serious way. I've also done Orkut and Google Buzz and Google+ and *diaspora and Imzy and various other failed experiments I hoped would be FB killers. I was never on MySpace because it was more music focused than I was interested in.
But yes, in a lot of ways I grew up on the internet, and I have never got over just how great it is to be able to talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, using a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous methods.
Part of why this is interesting is that I'm of the exact micro-generation who came of age just when internet access became straightforwardly available. Lots of people have written books about growing up middle class in the UK in the 80s and 90s, and the amazing impact of the tech revolution, and I know I'm nothing special, but still, it's a big part of my culture and personality.
When I was a kid, we had a home computer, an Acorn Electron at first, then a BBC Micro. They were expensive, the sort of thing that relied on having relatively financially comfortable and enlightened parents. But having a computer at home did us so much good. I think the reason we were fortunate with this is partly because one of my dad's closest friends was a programmer during an era when that was a highly unusual job, and therefore had a good vantage point to see that providing children with a microcomputer would be useful. Also Dad himself was working in telecommunications and keeping abreast of technological change, and we had a cousin a couple of years older who got quite into computers and I think our high-end BBC was a cast-off from him.
Yes, we played a lot of games – I remember the frustration of loading them from tape, which was not only slow but desperately unreliable. The thing is, playing games in the 80s was seriously educational; we would look at what would now be called the source code and understand how the games worked, and modify it to make the games easier or even just to personalize the in-game messages. Only one company, Superior Software, protected their code beyond the ability of under 10s to break in. We also did a lot of typing in programs from magazines, and debugging them, and again, modifying them in minor ways so it wasn't just mindless recipe following.
There was some access to similar computers at primary school; we did Logo programming to control a robot turtle, and played Granny's Garden, and sometimes I was left to play on the computer when the rest of the class were learning stuff I was too advanced for. It was a bit of a gimmick, though, having a computer at home was much more valuable. At one point my brother and I attended a 'programming club' which I remember as being really quite sleazy: it was held in the graffiti-covered, smoke-smelling basement of some local council building, and run by two middle-aged men who made a big deal out of being peripherally connected to the exciting bits of the emerging video games scene. Most of the other students were teenagers and a bit older than us. We learned quite a bit about how to structure programs sensibly, and worked on a giant sprawling text adventure thing.
Secondary school largely put me off taking programming any further, though. My school was incredibly snobby about computers, considering them as little more than fancy typewriters, and we were repeatedly discouraged from having too much to do with them as "you'll end up as nothing more than a secretary". It wasn't that girls can't program, it was that high flying intellectuals and future leaders, as we were expected to aspire to, don't bother with all that computing stuff. People who weren't predicted top grades at GCSE were sometimes nudged into taking IT as a kind of easy option. There was one IT teacher who was pretty good, but she was really frustrated by a system that saw computers as a last-ditch option for academic strugglers. Her male colleague, much more respected because sexism, was a bit of a lech and ended up in a relationship with one of the sixth formers who decided she quite liked the attention. I think it was about as consensual as a "relationship" between a teacher and student can be; they got married a couple of years after she finished school. Anyway, in this rather unpromising context, very much slanted towards IT rather than actual programming, I learned a bit of word processing and spreadsheets, and got access to some of the early PCs, pre-Microsoft, I think they might have been Acorn or RISC. And the good IT teacher did at one point introduce us to newsgroups, though we weren't allowed to look at anything in the
alt. hierarchy, as that was considered inappropriate for young girls. At home we had inherited Dad's cast-off Apple Mac from work, which started me out on a lifelong antipathy to all things Apple. Unlike the BBC Micro or even the PCs we used at school, you couldn't get 'under the hood' at all, which I hated. And there weren't any good games (at least not at pocket money prices), so that really did end up being a fancy expensive word processor. The one game the Mac did have was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, so I incidentally learned to touch type, which has of course stood me in excellent stead. Oh, and my siblings and I saved up absolutely all the money we could get our hands on (which wasn't much, we didn't have pocket money and usually if people gave us money for birthdays or the like, it was put into a savings account for future education), to buy a Nintendo Gameboy second-hand from a schoolfriend, so that became our main gaming console. I didn't really keep up with the programming after I was about 10 or 11, which is one of my major regrets now.
When I did a summer school in Israel in 1995, I discovered the proto-internet, chatrooms and message boards and more Usenet (with no teacher forbidding access to the interesting bits of it). I learned quickly that answering 'A/S/L' truthfully with 16/f/anything was a very, very bad idea. Even so, the discovery that networked computers were a relatively safe way to talk to interesting strangers all round the world was really quite important to me.
My parents gave me a desktop computer to take to uni in 1997. It was expected to be a stand-alone machine, meant for writing essays. Having been given a taste of the online world I spent a lot of time in the college computer room keeping in touch with pre-university friends by email and instant messenger (primarily ICQ, at the time, also Unix
ytalk within the university), and continuing with chat rooms and message boards. At some point in my undergraduate career, the college started providing ethernet connections in all the rooms, which was not unhelpful for work purposes, but was absolutely amazing for my social life. The year just after me, the university started providing webmail accounts rather than relying on Unix for email. I didn't realize this when I met and fell instantly in love with someone in the year below me; I used the Unix directory system I was used to search for her and stay in touch, and it just so happened that she had a society account on the old system, which she rarely checked but did just happen to see my 'let's meet up again' message. The society in question was the Gilbert & Sullivan society, and so my first personally owned rather than family computer acquired the name Silver Churn, in honour of being desperately (and I assumed unrequitedly) in love with a G&S singer. (
This most aesthetic, peripatetic, magnet he lived to learn / By no endeavour can magnet ever / Attract a silver churn.)
We got dial-up at home partway through my university career, as it was clear to my parents that having internet access was necessary for both academic and social purposes. It was frustrating to move back from ethernet on tap at university, to having to wait for the phone lines to be clear, and limit use because connection time was paid by the minute, but still, having internet at home was a lot better than not.
I brought a kind of mobile phone to university, one of the classic Nokias. It was a present from my grandmother, and it meant that I could phone home without having to wait in a queue for a public phone box in the middle of the quad. It also had SMS text messages, which of course are a much more useful way of doing logistics than anything previously invented.
I never really got into things like Geocities or otherwise creating content, and for the late 90s and early 2000s mostly moved away from striking up friendships with strangers on message boards, in favour of using the internet to talk in plain text to people I knew. Lots of lonnnnnnnnnng emails to
lethargic_man and MK and doseybat and others, lots of IM conversations with people who liked that kind of thing. I still wasn't programming at all; I think we did a tiny bit of Fortran in one of our practical classes, but it was very obviously just a make-work academic exercise. I started my PhD in 2001, just at the start of the time when every scientist had their own networked computer, even lowly grad students, because otherwise you basically couldn't work. Academic journals were moving from being mostly accessed via the library and desperately photocopying reams of everything remotely relevant, to being mostly online. I got dial-up at home, and paid for unlimited access and didn't really care about tying up the landline, so I was able to continue living online. I was kind of intrigued by blogging (which was a big fad in the early 2000s), and kept dithering about starting a blog (which interested me more than making a static website), but wasn't sure what I'd write about. Then I broke up with the girlfriend who had turned out to be attracted to me after all, and she asked me to join LJ. This was in 2003, and the rest is history.
No, there's one more thing. Through LJ I got into HTML and CSS, and volunteered for Support. LJ had this whole gamified system where you could be promoted depending on how much technical support you gave, and in order to answer the highest level questions, I had to learn to at least read code and debug it, even if I wasn't exactly programming. When DW started, I joined as a volunteer helping to adapt the forked LJ codebase for the new site. This was in early 2009. My volunteering for DW has tailed off to basically nothing (my most recent patch was 2014), but I really really enjoyed working on an Open Source codebase like that and I'd like to get back into it. I'm not sure DW is the right place for me, partly because development is only just barely active.
I didn't get a smartphone until I moved back to England in 2009, and it was a dreadful Blackberry I only used because I was living in temporary accommodation with no internet at home, and not having internet access outside work was basically unbearable by then. I got my first actually useful Android phone a year or so later.
Social networking: I've tried everything that comes out, really. I'm not cutting edge, but tend to be a second wave adopter. I joined Twitter in 2007 when it was still mostly based on one-to-many SMS rather than internet. And FB also in 2007, when you needed to be able to demonstrate you were a student or graduate of a reputable university to have an account. Tumblr round about then too, way before it took off in any serious way. I've also done Orkut and Google Buzz and Google+ and *diaspora and Imzy and various other failed experiments I hoped would be FB killers. I was never on MySpace because it was more music focused than I was interested in.
But yes, in a lot of ways I grew up on the internet, and I have never got over just how great it is to be able to talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, using a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous methods.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-22 09:45 am (UTC)Here's mine from last time the meme went round: https://woodpijn.livejournal.com/42636.html
Rachael
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-22 10:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-22 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-22 08:15 pm (UTC)Er, what? Magazine games, yes, but not the commercial ones. On the BBC Micro (and I assume קל וחומר on the Electron because of speed reasons), whilst most games had introductory material (title screen and instructions) in easily-broken-into BASIC, the games themselves were in machine code; you'd have needed to have been a seriously-geeky teenager to modify those beyond the level of perhaps changing the on-screen messages.*
Meanwhile, the software companies rapidly wised up that disk protection (my father got a disk drive with his first machine, a BBC Model B, in 1984, so I never had the tape experience except at friends') was necessary to prevent piracy; during the course of the second half of the eighties, games disks grew to have files in hidden tracks on the disk catalogue and files missing from the disk catalogue altogether, to make them not easily accessible, along with non-standard numbers of tracks per disk and non-standard numbers of sectors per track to make the disks uncopiable.
* Which is not to say it wasn't possible. I distributed the game I wrote at my school on a disk protected with all of the techniques listed in the last paragraph of my main content above, and no one could get past the protection; but then I foolish let someone browbeat me into giving him an unprotected copy of the game, and to my astonishment, the next day he and his friends were playing the higher levels of the game, which no one at school had previously seen: To do this, he had reverse-assembled the code and reverse-engineered its meaning—assembly language is difficult enough to understand when you've got symbolic labels and comments, but it's fiendishly opaque when all you've got is low-level instructions and memory addresses. I was amazed that he had managed to do that in the space of a month, let alone a single evening!
PS: Thanks for giving me the chance to use this icon again. :o)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-26 09:10 am (UTC)We started university at the same time but my first year of university was my first exposure to any sort of internet. I missed Usenet altogether and my internet social life was all on fora (I didn't like chat rooms) until 2007 when I got Facebook and 2008 when I got LJ (just as lots of people were drifting away from LJ).