<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>retrocryptid</author><text>Oh! Don&amp;#x27;t feel &lt;i&gt;too&lt;/i&gt; bad. While the late 70s and early 80s were a great time to be alive (and interested in small computers,) there was still that nagging feeling that if you could only get a system with just 64k more memory, you could do WONDERFUL things, instead of the mundane things you were working on.&lt;p&gt;But I will say... the thing that made it interesting to me in retrospect is none of us knew what we were doing. I mean sure, we could write code, but we wrote it in languages that let us shoot ourselves in the feet. repeatedly. The first time I saw Smalltalk was like a religious experience. The day I realized why I couldn&amp;#x27;t use Smalltalk for &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; systems was like losing my religion.&lt;p&gt;On the hardware side... it seemed there was a new peripheral every week: 3&amp;quot; floppies, 2.8&amp;quot; floppies, 3.5&amp;quot; floppies, hey! an affordable hard drive!, voice recognition, head mounted displays, etc.&lt;p&gt;No one seemed to have figured out what the market would want to buy and certainly not how to make it at a profit.&lt;p&gt;And to me... that spirit of adventure... the &amp;quot;hey, let&amp;#x27;s just try this new thing and see if it works,&amp;quot; was what characterized that era.&lt;p&gt;And &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;right now&lt;/i&gt; can have the same experience. Just go out and learn about something halfway new (like how to use LISP in a modern web stack. (okay. maybe it&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; new.)) And try to find a group that&amp;#x27;s experimental.&lt;p&gt;The hardware and software tools we have now are INSANELY better than when I was a kid. Approach the market with that &amp;quot;beginners mind&amp;quot; and it&amp;#x27;ll be great.&lt;p&gt;And from the description of the timing of your arrival in computing, you&amp;#x27;re probably senior enough people will need to take you seriously.&lt;p&gt;-cheers!</text><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>I’m always a little sad that I missed the golden age of computing. I read my first Byte Magazine in the mid 1990s, a couple of years before they stopped publishing. Even then there was a ton of substance about the upcoming Windows 95 release, various detours in OS design that never panned out like Taligent, and how RISC was going to take over the world. It’s rare to read articles of that depth anymore, even on the web much less in published media.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Byte Magazine – LISP (1979)</title><url>https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1979-08</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>aj7</author><text>Personally, I think there was nothing golden-age about that time. I stuck with Physics. Monthly breakthroughs, yes.  The giants whose shoulders we stand on, walking the earth, yes.  But opportunities and platforms were miniscule compared to now.  IBM’ers sneered at everyone else.  This is the golden age of computing.</text><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>I’m always a little sad that I missed the golden age of computing. I read my first Byte Magazine in the mid 1990s, a couple of years before they stopped publishing. Even then there was a ton of substance about the upcoming Windows 95 release, various detours in OS design that never panned out like Taligent, and how RISC was going to take over the world. It’s rare to read articles of that depth anymore, even on the web much less in published media.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Byte Magazine – LISP (1979)</title><url>https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1979-08</url></story>