1979 - !? Your challenge might pose a dilemma if you said 1879 or 1479 - but 1979 was just yesterday. Instead of Hacker News, you would have Usenet. Instead of Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple you would have IBM and DEC ... and Microsoft and Apple. Instead of programming in Javascript and Python and Lisp and C you would use BASIC and Pascal ... and Lisp and C. Instead of running on Windows or Linux it would run on VMS or Unix.
For HN readers, what makes an era's technology appealing are the opportunities it presents to be creative and make a contribution. By that measure 1979 was not worse than today, in some ways it was more interesting because there was more variety and it wasn't clear which few technologies would shake out. Look at a 1979 issue of BYTE - in addition to Apple and Microsoft there were hundreds of other companies of similar size pursuing promising, eccentric, and/or dead-end ideas.
For another view of computing as seen from the 1970s, including many roads not taken, see Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming": http://worrydream.com/dbx/
> Instead of running on Windows or Linux it would run on VMS or Unix.
And that means it would be in some institution or company, rather than in your home.
The big difference in 1979 would be that the consumer computing hardware available then was poorly affordable even for consume hardware, and terribly under-powered.
If you wanted to do anything beyond dinking around with some 1Mhz 8-bit processor with a few kilobytes of RAM, and weren't rich, you would only have access to decent hardware through work or school.
Sure, but none of that prevented you from creating and inventing and just having fun. It was an exciting time because microprocessors had just appeared and it wasn't yet clear what all might be done with them. People did amazing things with those 8 bit processors - do you think Woz and Gates were just dinking around?
If you were interested in computing it wasn't so hard to get yourself to a company or school that would provide access. They didn't stop you from creating and inventing.
Nowadays computing is more dominated by a few large companies and institutions than it was then. Do you really
own, control, understand, and trust your phone and other gadgets as well as they did then with their 8 bit processors?
Woz and Jobs quit decent jobs and had to sell belongings to fund their project.
Gates had access to mainframe computers capable of running an emulator of the 8 bit systems he was targeting, using which he was able to debug his BASIC interpreters.
> If you were interested in computing it wasn't so hard to get yourself to a company or school that would provide access.
And as for the rest, why they could just get a terminal with a 110 baud acoustically-coupled modem and try their luck breaking in.
Nobody was going to let you near equipment costing 100K's of dollars, without credentials, and even then, it would have been be difficult to use the equipment for hobby projects.
For HN readers, what makes an era's technology appealing are the opportunities it presents to be creative and make a contribution. By that measure 1979 was not worse than today, in some ways it was more interesting because there was more variety and it wasn't clear which few technologies would shake out. Look at a 1979 issue of BYTE - in addition to Apple and Microsoft there were hundreds of other companies of similar size pursuing promising, eccentric, and/or dead-end ideas.
For another view of computing as seen from the 1970s, including many roads not taken, see Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming": http://worrydream.com/dbx/