Cottage Computer Programming (1984)

(atariarchives.org)

26 points | by lioeters 4 days ago

3 comments

  • ylee 2 hours ago

    What Lutus talks about exists even when it's not for anyone else.

    I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.

    (I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)

  • wumms 12 minutes ago

    > computers take over a lot of the trivial thinking we do, freeing us to be creative

    • EvanAnderson 2 hours ago

      Paul Lutus recently commented in this thread that linked this (and other) articles of the era: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830191

      • II2II 27 minutes ago

        Thank you for linking that since it sort of answered one of my questions: what would a person who lived in the backwoods of Oregon to escape the distractions of the world think about computers bringing the distractions of the world into their home?