I Loved Computers Before the Internet was a Thing
Fri 10 April 2026
A reconstruction of the Commodore 64's BASIC prompt, adapted from Wikipedia
I loved computers before the internet was a thing, and I will continue enjoying them long after the internet becomes an unusable hellhole of mass surveillance, age verification, deplorably invasive technical "standards," and hyper-aggressive advertising.
I've seen truly enormous triumphs in "personal" computing over my lifetime. Computers went from monstrous lumbering machines hidden away in a handful of bright computer rooms in each city to inscrutable-but-inviting beige boxes you could bring home for the price of a used car, to appealing gadgets you could carry in your backpack (or later, in an oversized pocket), to sleek-aluminum-slab status symbols, and finally, to glass rectangles used mostly passively, as a successor to the television, which you can carry with you everywhere.
At the same time, the Internet went from a distant promise, hidden in university and military facilities, and hinted at in the delightfully oblique world of bulletin board services, to an inviting, new, but still cryptic realm to be explored on the mysterious terminals and UNIX workstations at Universities, to something you'd occasionally dial into from home, to a permanent "utility" you'd install at home via cable, DSL, or finally fiber optic line, and eventually, to this magical, mysterious, ever-present wireless subspace realm that is accessible to you at any place or time you should so choose.
But before the internet was a thing, before any kind of online services were readily available, I was enjoy hours in front of my computer with only a literal handful of games and the ever-inviting, but hella unwieldy BASIC interpreter (and later, the absolute glory of HyperCard).
I think this might be difficult for a young person to understand, because unfortunately, it has become very normative for people to use computing devices in a very passive way. The chief machine-human interaction paradigm has gone from a placid and open "What would you like to do today?" to a more controlling "Here is what you should read, watch, and be upset about right this second." We've gone from a textual paradigm to a graphical paradigm to now a feed paradigm, and it is the purpose of the feed to force-feed you as much information (and advertising) as possible.
It's the worst.
But sitting in front of a computer in 1985 or 1995? Limitless possibilities. An invitation to truly understand the machine, and not just be a passive consumer of human or machine-made slop.
But fortunately, human-centric, human-empowering computing hasn't gone anywhere. While both major computer operating systems (Windows and MacOS) and both major mobile operating systems (Android and iOS/iPadOS) are all pretty terrible from the perspective of letting the user to do what they wish with the device that they themselves purchased, there are excellent alternatives (at least in the non-mobile space) that are still user-centric, rather than corporate-centric and invasive. Linux distributions, the various BSDs, Haiku, and others are all worth looking into, and very enjoyable in their own right, although they all have their own individual strengths and weaknesses, as you would expect.
So, in the midst of the encroaching Digital Dark Age, there are still plenty of ways to enjoy truly personal computing without having a constant corporate nanny trying to bug you to spend money on something, watch something, think something, or believe something.
And even if the Digital Dark Age becomes so bad that the Internet itself becomes an unusable heap of nonsense, computing itself is an enjoyable pastime, and will be viable, even if we have to construct computers out of sticks and leaves while foraging for non-irradiated Hershey's bars. 😄
Category: Humor Tagged: BSD Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FreeBSD Hobbies Humor Life Linux Non-religious post Non-technical post Productivity Retrocomputing Social Media UNIX
