briefly gorgeous
i got my first computer when i was around 12 years old. however, for the initial year, i could not play any games on it because the shopkeeper had not installed the graphics card software, and i was not aware that such a thing existed. i spent my time watching movies.
once you have a computer, you tend to make friends only with people who also have computers at home. the idea was that you could exchange pirated proprietary software, movies, and video games. my first laptop was an hp430, which had 4gb of ram and an intel pentium 4. i played all kinds of games on it, from gta sa to prototype 2 and cod mw 2, but it had its limits.
it wasn’t what you had on the computer that was valuable, but the process of obtaining it. you had to exchange software and movies with people in exchange for something new. sometimes, you had to travel as far as 10km by bicycle to meet a friend of a friend (sometimes a random person) and collect games and movies from them. the process was fun, and we made friends along the way—typical geeks and nerds.
similarly, i came across python for the first time when someone shared a python course with me on my pen drive. they told me that i could learn the language and create amazing things with it. i learned python, made my first chatbot (it was basically randomizing 5 sentences for each kind of response stored in an xml file), tried android studio, and attempted to make pc games, but couldn’t complete them due to a lack of the right resources. i think the reason probably was my lack of ability to read documentation.
on the other hand, what we see today is that everybody has their own access to internet wifi, so they do not need to go to anyone else's house. people now make friends over twitter and discord. they share links instead of files, youtube videos instead of irl explanations, and follow/check online instead of going to someone's house and yelling.
kids of the same age now have access to more resources and quality articles than we had back then. but at the same time, we, in our late 20s, have better resources than what our previous generation had.
it’s interesting how, over time, the very essence of interaction remains the same, even though the medium has changed. and on earth we are briefly gorgeous.