Let’s doooo it!

Hi.

Yeah, I grew up on those days, and missed most of the computer revolution simply because my family couldn’t afford any of it. I did have a rich friend that dabbled, so I got so see the edges of it, but I didn’t get to dive in deep like a lot of people did in those days. I’m making up for it now, though!

Sacrilege! May your data streams be corrupted and your access to shared knowledge be denied!

I’m bound by honor to copy your statement and use it as my own, whenever and wherever I please! :)

Here’s what the beauty looked like:

No worries, friend. I was scared you were part of the org that was charging for the article. I’ll delete my snarky comment too! :)

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Yep, I went down the rabbit hole all day yesterday. Decided that we have better, cheaper alternatives by just buying and hacking an older laptop.

It really was a fantastic idea, always hoped it would catch on but alas, the Chromebook took over in education spaces thanks to subsidies from Google for the data collection.

Yep. I do wish they would revisit the whole “water-resistant, rubber/plastic tought as a Tonka truck, drop-resistant, hand crank to charge-up” ideas though!

I feel all powerful. If I could only get the volume to work…

Working on that to see if I can get it to work.

Oh, I’ll look that one up, because I’m not familiar with it. Thanks!

Yeah, and I appreciate the goals it had, and even tho if failed, they tried. I am using mine and trying to figure out to post on Lemmy with it, but the browser is old and doesn’t do https sites, but if I can figure it out, I wanna use it for my lemmy machine. lol

Giving it a listen. Thank you!

Fun concept tho. Especially in 2005:

In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte’s new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, dubbed “the green machine” or simply “the $100 laptop.”

The $100 laptop would have all the features of an ordinary computer but require so little electricity that a child could power it with a hand crank. It would be rugged enough for children to use anywhere, instead of being limited to schools.

A Linux-based operating system would give kids total access to the computer — OLPC had reportedly turned down an offer of free Mac OS X licenses from Steve Jobs.

Here’s a nice little intro docu about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJYWc6NZt0&ab_channel=ThisDoesNotCompute

It just so happens I have one of the first ones from 2005. It’s been in my garage for 20 years. Fired it up as I read this article, and it still works:

Me too! In that article there is a cover of BYTE mag with the pirate ship on it, and I remember reading that in my best friend’s basement while listening to the radio and drinking Pepsi out of a glass bottle! I shot him a text just now with the pic of that magazine.

Fuck those times were awesome!

My biggest regret tho, is that even tho I was fairly interested in computers then, I was more interested in girls. So I fucked around with girls all my teens and 20’s instead of riding the tech wave and having it for a career. Got my gf pregnant at 17, and had to start working a factory job butchering turkeys and chickens. (Obviously I don’t regret having my children, just saying I could have been smarter about it.)

Now I’m retired and making up for lost time by becoming the biggest tech nerd ever, and fucking embracing all of it all day: AI, Lemmy, PieFed, Mastadon, Linux, Racket, Python, Java, Lua, etc… LMAO

It’s either that or pickelball all day! But fuck that noise, I wanna be an old computer punk pirate, shitposting and annoying the hell out of young Lemmys for the rest of my days. Considering the number of bans I have, all because I’m a socialist anarchist, my plan seems to be working! :)

From the article: “Personal computers functioned differently in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike domestic computational technologies such as video game consoles or pocket calculators, the Apple II and many of its competitors were not designed as proprietary or closed systems. Indeed, the entire appeal of a personal computer was that it put computing power directly in the hands of users. It was essential that users be able not only to program on their machine but also to save and distribute the work they did.”

It needs to be like this now!

I was in my early teens in the 1970’s and 1980’s. My family was way too poor to afford any of the computer. The only people in my hometown who had this stuff were wealthy. So I think this authors use of the term “relatively inexpensive” sorta downplays how much that shit cost in the day.

The first actual computer I ever saw or got to play with was a RadioShack TRS-80, that my then-gf’s dad had. The 1977 cost for that was $599 USD. Adjusted for Inflation, that’s around $3,000 USD in today’s dollars.

In 1981, Robert Tripp, editor and publisher of MICRO: The 6502 Journal, likened the copying of software to the photocopying of a magazine and acknowledged that MICRO would have no livelihood if readers could simply get the content free or at minimal cost.

Thus began the drama of copy protection, an industrial loss prevention practice wherein companies used a combination of hardware and software techniques to scramble the data on software media formats, typically 5.25-inch floppy disks, so that copying the disk was no longer possible by conventional means. While the goal of this subtle bit of friction was to throttle piracy, it also prevented users from creating backup copies of software they legally owned, or otherwise accessing the code itself.