Comment by kstrauser
4 days ago
Who are you, and why are you writing my biography? Your journey was nearly identical to mine. I truly, sincerely feel like we went through a golden age, where amazing things were starting to become possible but you hard to work hard enough to get them that you couldn't help but learn something new along the way.
Yeah, if I were 10 now I'm not sure where I'd end up in terms of life/career, but it wouldn't look anything like my actual path, even adjusting for the obvious technological differences.
I'm fairly certain that computers to a 10 year old me in 2026 would be far less interesting than they were to actual 10 year old me in 1983.
The relative mystery they had around them then (assuming you weren't the kid of a turing award winner or some such, my parents were just normie folks) and seeking out the rare bits of written documentation held in a tiny dark corner at libraries, in tattered old used books, etc was like learning ancient, arcane magic knowledge and that was a lot of the allure for me.
Having instant access to most of the world's knowledge to answer any question you might have is objectively powerful, but just not nearly as fun as half-blindly intuiting your way through the dark weeds until deep understanding eventually just falls into place.
I was going to post something similar. I think the Amiga's CLI helped me ease into unix/Linux which is how I got my first programming job.
Same here. It clearly wasn't Unix, but it was a whole lot closer to Unix than MS-DOS was. All the basic concepts were there, and when I eventually migrated into a Linux environment it all felt familiar.