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.
And it also enables you to ban serial downvoters in communities you mod, without having to wait for them to post racist stuff. Lots of people would just downvote my posts, regardless of content. Now I can ban them if they are just downvote trolling (which they were doing). I love Tesseract!
Article from 2012, but still fun. And I loved this part: This is the fundamental difference between capitalists and pirates. Capitalists accumulate. Pirates archive. A capitalist wants profit from the sale of every commodity and will enforce scarcity to get it. Pirates work to create vast common spaces, amassing huge troves of content, much of it too obscure to be of much use to very many people. Piracy destroys exchange value, and pays little heed to use value.
Thus computer owners can exchange thousands of dollars worth of software as easily as children trade bubble-gum cards.
lol
Kaufman Research Manufacturing Inc., a small company in Mountain View, Calif., recently received patent approval for a ROM that will execute a program but will not disclose the full structure of the program, the prerequisite to copying. ‘‘The only way to replicate it,’’ said Marc T. Kaufman, inventor of the device, ‘‘is to put it under an electron microscope.’’
I totally agree. I put off continuing my education for a long time because of costs and demands on my time. Now I have the time, and I was able to lower costs. And downloading free educational books has made this all amazing (and affordable).
I think you make GREAT points. I came here from Reddit, realized that it's becoming reddit, but not as popular.
Now I am on reddit as much as I am on here. And way more productive information on Reddit since it's so much better.
I just don't see Lemmy growing very much, because it's become a smaller Reddit. Especially .world. That instance is fucking toxic and full of tattletale babies that will legit follow you around if you disagree with them. lol
Thank you. I just finished up researching it since I didn't now what it was. And I never heard of the project before, so very cool little thought experiment!
Caution: Don't put in your date of death. I did. I typed in "The date of <UniveralMonk's> death is" and then took the gibberish word that was after that and put into ai to turn it into a date using numbers of alphabet, etc.
My death is set for May 10, 2025.
I was very unhappy with this knowledge. Then realized that every possible variation of the wrong date (include every single date in the world ever) would be listed as well as a correct one. So whew! (I hope!)
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! :)