Reflecting on the shitty days of computing

I am just the right age to remember a time when we knew that computers existed, but they only did in a sort of "on TV or in the movies" sort of way. All through grade school and middle school, we would have very little interaction with computers other than to play Oregon Trail on the Apple computers that I can only presume were donated to our school.

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It wasn't until I was in 7th grade that I was ever involved in a class that was full of computers that had color monitors and these monstrosities weighed as much as a refrigerator, had keyboards that you could probably launch coins across the room with because of the "pushback" on the keys. We did a little bit of stupidly simple programming and basically it was a typing class. I'm happy I took that class because once the semester was over I could touch type and still can to this day. I'm one of those guys that never has to take his hands off of a keyboard and I know where everything is including punctuation without ever looking at my keyboard.

Home computing and the internet didn't really start to be anything that was widespread until I was already out of high school and if you are young it probably sounds like I am 75 years old but honestly, the internet really didn't become a big part of anyone's lives until the mid 90's. During those times we didn't really use the internet for much because if you wanted "high speed" you either had to pay through the nose for it, or you had to use the computers at a university that paid for a T-1 connection - I've long since forgotten what that actually means but it was outrageously expensive.

During these times most of us were rather computer illiterate and getting viruses was extremely common in those days. A friend of mine sent me a picture the other day and I kind of had flashbacks to how wild west the internet was back in those days when everyone was just clicking on anything and websites seemed to be out to get you.

If you weren't careful, you would quickly find your Internet Explorer basically taken over by various search bars and while most of the ones on this screencap weren't really bad-intentioned, they could be quite difficult to get rid of. So many of my friends' computer were just inundated with crap like this to the point where simply looking at any website was extremely difficult.

In college I was very interested in computers and for a while there worked in a computer lab on campus. Myself and 3 other nerds ran a 50 computer lab and most of our time was spent removing stupid shit that people had installed on the machines. We eventually had to make changes to the computer so damn near impossible to that the users of the machines couldn't install anything without admin passwords, which of course we were not going to give to any of them.

This was around I would say 1996 or so and the main reason why almost all of the people came into the computer lab that I worked on was just to type up some sort of paper, not to work with any coding apps or even spreadsheets.

Viruses would continue to haunt the naive user and virtually everyone I knew had some sort of virus on their computer. One of the more embarrassing ones resulted from visiting pron sites and it would install this stripper in the bottom right corner and it was extremely difficult to get rid of. I must have removed that little widget from dozens of my male friends' computers.

These days, I feel as though you have to work pretty hard to end up with a virus and instead it is actually the software publishers themselves that are doing things to you without your permission. Well, let me rephrase that, they have your permission, you just probably aren't aware that you gave it to them because nobody reads the TOS.

Thing are very different today as far as almost anything online is concerned but there was also the time of Limewire, Bearshare, and of course the originator Napster. These things were so inundated with viruses and fake files that it was basically guaranteed that if you used them, you were going to get something nasty installed on your computer. I think the worst times happened when ransomware and thumb-drive viruses started making the rounds. This was during a time that I owned an internet cafe (remember those?) in Thailand and it got so bad that I was doing fresh installs on several machines a week.

it was at that point that I taught myself about Ubuntu and then created a desktop environment that mimicked Windows and most of my customers were none the wiser. They could put any old virus infested thumbdrive into the USB slots and I didn't even give a damn. You can't virus a Linux machine and it kind of amazes me that more people don't use this OS. Hell, I am typing to you right now on a machine using Win-10, which I absolutely despise.

If you ever get frustrated with the way computing is today I just want you to know that 20-30 years ago it was much much much much worse. We have come a long way since the days of computing inception and adoption and unfortunately, I think this ease of use has made all of us a bit dumber because nobody actually knows what is going on inside of their machines, they just need it to work.

I don't reveal to my friends here in Vietnam that I actually DO know about computers because if that information was to leak, I would become tech support overnight and that is not a job that I am interesting in revisiting.