alt Hacker News> You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them. Sometimes you built a boot disk for a single game. A floppy whose entire reason to exist was to start the computer in the configuration that one program demanded.
Is the premise here correct? I'm not sure that I'm convinced that a 1990s computer user who knew how to edit autoexec.bat or insert a floppy to boot their computer "knew how it worked" in a meaningful sense.
The stack of abstractions is deeper now, and all indications suggest it's not going to stop deepening. But I think the abstractions were already quite deep by the 1990s.
(I think the classic error here is a demographic one: computer nerds always poke through abstractions, because they do it for fun. I don't think that's going to stop, anymore than web browsers stopped people from writing kernels. If anything, we write more low-level code than ever, because access to the prerequisite knowledge is less gatekept than before.)
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This isn't said enough.
The most vocal demographic on HN right now is not the nerds. The entrepreneurs and grifters are desperate to find footing somewhere. They continue to double down on the alleged impact of "AI" and are now asking that their followers remember the moments they are most nostalgic for, assume everyone else was doing what they were back then (fumbling and confused), and ignore all the rest of history.