Most of the time, I don't long for the “good old days” at all – mainly because there's so much about the old days that really wasn't all that good. In my profession, the computers have gotten more powerful, cheaper, and smaller – and the tools we use today are fantastically powerful compared to the (by comparison) extremely primitive tools I first learned.
But there is one aspect of working with microcomputers that I miss. When I first got started (in the '70s), it was possible for a single individual to understand how an entire computer worked. I know this, because in the late '70s, some friends and I had a company making microcomputers. I designed (and we built) the entire thing: electronics (even the power supply!), operating system, and application software. We bought components and some subsystems (like floppy disk drives), but everything else we built. It wasn't even that hard. Computers were much simpler back then.
Today's computers are far too complex for one person to design and build the whole thing. Most people working with computers today know one area reasonably well, but the rest of the computer is a bit of a mystery to them. I'm not the only one to notice this.
That's the part I really do miss: knowing how the whole thing worked...
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