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A 25-Year-Old Blog Looks Back At 40 Years of Computing (markround.com) 79

Posted by BeauHD from the trip-down-memory-lane dept.
Ancient Slashdot reader Mark Round writes: Longtime reader here (since mid-1999 -- Hot Grits! Oog the Caveman! Beowulf clusters!), and I can still remember posting back on Slashdot's own 5th anniversary. Time's rolled on: my own blog just turned 25, and it's now roughly 40 years since I first sat down at a computer. So I went digging through archive.org, old backups, and a box of ZIP disks, and wrote up a long look back at four decades of computing through the one website that's been my online home along the way.

It runs from my first 8-bit micro and a 1,200-baud modem through discovering the actual Internet at university (and burning far too many hours on Slashdot and sister sites like freshmeat.net), past gloriously pimped-out Enlightenment Linux desktops, all the way to the modern cloud-native world. Plenty of dodgy screenshots, terrible code, and fond memories of long-gone haunts like kuro5hin.org and Linux Coffee Talk along the way.

A 25-Year-Old Blog Looks Back At 40 Years of Computing More | Reply

A 25-Year-Old Blog Looks Back At 40 Years of Computing

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  • First Post! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mark Round ( 211258 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @11:29AM (#66207756) Homepage

    Front page of Slashdot after 25 years, and First Post. Life goal unlocked!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ck1dog ( 43846 )

      Hell yeah! Also that was a great write-up and I love all of the pictures, it's a great trip to the past.

    • Re:First Post! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Known Nutter ( 988758 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @11:55AM (#66207808)
      Frost Piss!!!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      Another ancient here - I still try to convince the admins to give me my first account back, this one - number 13802 [slashdot.org]. The place both has and has not changed - it always had its share of ranting, but people do seem to knee-jerk more negatively to developments than in ye olden days.

      Note that I created my account, saw that nearly 14,000 people were here and thought "what's the point? Who will ever possibly hear me in a place with 14,000 people?". Now of course, you can get ten times that for a picture of a d
      • I was here before moderation started (mid/late 97?) but didn't bother to create an account for a long time as it wasn't necessary for posting.

        We had flame wars back then, sure, but not the mass freakouts/meltdowns we see today. The kids are not all right.

        • Re:First Post! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @01:04PM (#66208014)
          The kids? Most of the people posting here have been around for decades. The kids are on Reddit or whatever will eventually replace it. It's the same people as always who are posting here, only now they're several decades older and crankier. We could all always go somewhere else, but we all think those places would only be worse.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by spudnic ( 32107 )

          Yup. I put off creating an account for quite some time because I just didn't need it. I should have done it earlier.

        • I lost access to my original /. account when I left USM in 1993 and forgot to update my email address before leaving.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Reeses ( 5069 )

          On the other hand, I created an account as fast as I could on the day they went live.

        • By the time Slashdot started using id's, I thought it had already become too crowded to have a useful conversation, so I didn't bother to register. I don't even remember why I eventually broke down and registered one.

          I remember my first post was to a discussion of whether it was better for Linux distros to conform to a set of committee defined standards, or simply to allow the market to define de facto standards. Of course, that was posted under my real name, as was usually the custom at the time. I remembe

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by kackle ( 910159 )
            That's interesting because in the BBS days of the 1980s, nobody used his real name. I took that "lesson" over to the public Internet when it came around, and was surprised that people were using their real names on it.

      • Things don't change fast here. You can still add your AIM and ICQ info in your account settings.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Reeses ( 5069 )

          RIP to my old five-digit ICQ number that got pried out from under me by Russian hackers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reeses ( 5069 )

      It's the double crown of Slashdot membership.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by juancn ( 596002 )

      Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!!

    • Definitely a life goal unlocked! Lurked for a long time using a 40lb aluminum PPC box before officially signing up. I still check in on a regular basis.
      Its good to see the old regulars check in once in a while.

      Congrats on keeping the webpage up. Its always great to see peoples exposure and individual experience in computing hardware (my favorite) and software.

  • (I've been around since 1999 too). You missed Natalie Portman, BTW

  • For those who don't realize it, 40 years ago the Mac has existed for 2 yeras. This is well into the era of 8-bit Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, alongside 16 bit machines like the IBM PC. Console wise, we're in the NES era.

    The years of the old 8-bits like the VIC-20 and TRS-80 have started to wane, as had hobby computers you built yourself. Perhaps it's the era of modern computing as we know it today where people just bought boxes off the shelf for their computers more so than soldering computers together.

    Anyo

    • I feel ancient now.

      Yes, I have a beard. and yes, quite a lot of it is grey.

    • Nice. Do you recall the usenet conversations about a HURD port for c64? or a few years later about HURD completely merging the Linux kernel ....?

    • 50 years for me. My first hands on experience with a computer was in high school through a ASR33 teletype connected to a mainframe located who knows where. That eventually led to learning the PDP-8, then a Intel 8080 computer hand wire-wrapped on a S-100 buss. It took 10 years before I graduated to my first actual PC.

    • The years of the old 8-bits like the VIC-20 and TRS-80 have started to wane

      True but a slight understatement. C64 essentially killed off VIC-20. It did everything the VIC did but so much better that there was no practical reason to cling on to a VIC-20. (Aside from being morbidly addicted to a specific game cartridge.) Everyone were upgrading the first chance they got.

      64KB ought to be enough for anybody, darnit.

  • ... I go back farther
    I learned programming in the early 70s, on a mainframe with punchcards.
    I entered bootstrap code with toggle switches.
    I wire wrapped circuit boards.
    I first used the Arpanet, precursor to the internet, on a teletype.
    My first PC was an IMSAI 8080.

    I agree, things have changed a lot.

    • Whoa, punchcards? Lucky dog! I had to chisel my ones and zeros out of stone. In fact, we didn't even have ones and zeros. We had to use the letters 'O' and 'I'.

      • We din' even have chisels, we had to scratch out our O's and I's with our fingernails. Lazy kids these days.

        • You had fingernails? Luxury! We had a to evolve a protrusion -- over millions of years -- to secrete acid that etched 1s & 0s.

    • I started working with computers just a couple months after our local uni dumped punchcards for terminals. I considered myself lucky back then, and I'm still glad I never had to do it.

      I do have a few programs saved on paper tape, however. ;-)

  • [coughs as dust billows up]

  • I bought mu first computer (A Trash-80) in July of '79

    When I was in high school, we mailed programs on punched card (punched with a paperclip) to the university 100 miles away and got the printouts back a few days later...

  • Get off my lawn (Score:3)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @01:06PM (#66208022)

    1200 baud?! Feh. I started with a 110 baud acoustic coupler modem on a Teletype 110 that operated at a whopping 11 characters per second.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      Sheer luxury, lad! Sheer luxury!

      We had to make our own bits and push them uphill! Both ways! In the snow!

      • You must have not known about the SCSI/T1 driver on those TRS tandys.... !

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jd ( 1658 )

          The Trash 80s? Had a Commodore PET 3032. A whole 1 megahertz. On the other hand, the IEEE 488 meant that I could send a command to one disk drive to transfer to a second disk drive, whilst printing, with the computer then totally free to actually do other stuff. SCSI it wasn't, but for the time, it was an ingenious solution to a lot of problems.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chiapup ( 532011 )
      Yo! Me, too! 1968. Xavier U Mainframe. Teletype. Whee!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sdjimmy ( 875372 )
      Burroughs B5700 running CandE Time sharing system. (command and edit) using the same. ASR-33 offline paper tape and 110 baud. Those were the days.

    • I had 1200 baud, but it was on a TI-99/4A. A 16-bit computer trapped on an 8-bit bus.

  • Retro (Score:2)

    by klui ( 457783 )

    Any of you old timers into retro computing? I like watching people restore them but honestly I don't have any desire using the OSes or applications, including NeXT stuff, which I still have a couple of slabs and a cube with NeXTdimension.

    It's much more interesting seeing how people investigate faults and fix them because I have no hardware knowledge. I disengage after people fix the boards then try to get them to work dealing with IRQ configuration and driver selection. Back then I used a Macintosh to avoid

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reeses ( 5069 )

      No. Every time I try a retro computer I'm immediately reminded why we were all so happy to move beyond it.

  • But I do see quite a few low user id folks posting ..

    Slashdot is still part of my daily reading habit, after all these years. It's the one site I've always read every day.

  • REAL men kept a web diary before the word "blog" was coined. OTOH, if "blog" means something where others can comment on posts, then to me Slashdot is the original "blog", again a couple of years before the word.

  • On the 5 year post [slashdot.org]. Don't want to think about how much time I've spent commenting here since then. Damn, I've been here almost 30 years. Still spending my work day in Linux.

    Who's this old guy in the mirror?

  • Having actually RTFA for once... I was looking at where Mark was noting his first email address.

    I remember those days -- pre internet, so you had to give the route (...!ucbvax!ucscb).
    We also had write (and for see as you type, "rite") on our PDP-11/70, and for the life of me, I couldn't understand why I'd use email instead of write. It took a while before I realized the value of asynchronous communication.

    But yes, those were the days.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hoover ( 3292 )

      good times indeed! I think I must also have registered on day one or so once ids became available. I still check in here a few times a week, and while I've seen most headlines (usually verbatim) before on ars technica, the occasional "news item" still shows up.

      I started out on a 300baud, then upgraded to a 2400 modem.

      First computer I owned: Dragon 64 (used), but I started out programming basic in 9th form which must have been 1982 on a genie16 and trs-80 provided by our school in a "computer lab" that had a

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