My first computer was an Altair.
It was a machine from a time when personal computers were a hopeful symbol of a better future for the whole of humanity. Tech bro sumbitches monetized that hope away, and now our future is an adversarial billionaire-feeding dystopia, promising more billionaires and more dystopia.
I’m old enough to retire soon, and I constantly feel someone took away the future I was promised as a teen. As a frustrated gen-Xer who generally had it good despite everything, I can’t imagine the kind of despair young people today are going through. At least I can remember the Altair, and that’s something.
Awesome. I never used the Altair, but a friends father had one which we were not allowed to go near. A couple years later we did manage to get access to an IMSAI 8080 running IMDOS. Not long after, the TRS-80 came out, and became the foundational experience that got me hooked on computers, and was the reason I spent a lot of time lurking around Radio Shacks, haha.
Then my school bought three 4k TRS-80 Model III units, where I learned to make my own double sided floppies and write code.
Those were good times, indeed, compared to today. I don’t really relate to most of the modern tech world, despite having been an eager witness to the forefront of it throughout my youth. There’s no allure left for me in this techno-fascist reality we now inhabit. These days, I spend much of my free time growing vegetables and planting trees instead, which takes the edge off the frustration and disappointment. I like to think of myself as my own meta-assembler within the framework of ecology.
Yeah, I realized the computer world was going down the drain when Scott McNealy inadvertently spill the beans on the industry’s true intentions in 1999, and a few years later, I quit programming entirely and changed career.
I still use computers because I have to, and I maintain a few open-source projects of little importance so I can say I’ve done my part. But mostly I’m busy avoiding computers and trying to maintain whatever shred of privacy I have left.
😞
