What if Hacker News had existed in 1976 when Apple 1 was released?

Question

Would people here have criticized Woz's circuit design, which most engineers have praised as genius and sublime?Even when I think something is perfectly done, 100% of the time there is criticism here: scoffing that xyz did this already or abc is coming out with this same thing soon etc.

tlb · Accepted Answer

I hung around the local computer store and lurked on BBSs in the early Apple 2 era, and people with serious computers (16 bit, S100 bus, CP/M) definitely scoffed at this 8-bit toy with not even a floppy drive.People will scoff at anything new. It doesn't predict much about its eventual success.

throwaway167 · Answer

In that case, I think HN and its users would rightfully be in mocking mode having pioneered HTML, CSS, JS, a modern browser to run this all, widespread home internet capable of handling the heady 50KB of the front page and computing power of 10 Crays to handle that, all for getting into arguments about what to do with said self-invented JS, units of measurement, pedantry over careless phrasing, a poor grasp of economics, and of course on-upmanship for the karma, all while still not having learnt Lisp that'd already been around for 16 years.Quite impressive really. Less impressive than the last 1.5 decades that's been about owning others' data and lives while serving them short videos, increasing social distance while increasing social pressure, increasing off the clock, always on pressures, and thousands+ of highly educated peoples' livelihoods based around making spinning gizmos while another video loads.

joezydeco · Answer

We'd be too busy arguing over Bill Gates' 1976 letter to hobbyists about pirating Micro-Soft Altair BASIC.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

codingdave · Answer

I mean, PLATO Notes was up and running at that time. I'm not sure what else was, but online discussion boards did exist. I can't speak to the culture of the community or what they talked about as that was before my time. The University of Illinois has archives of some of it, though, if you want to go see:https://digital.library.illinois.edu/collections/7bfaf980-07...

What if Hacker News had existed in 1976 when Apple 1 was released?

Would people here have criticized Woz's circuit design, which most engineers have praised as genius and sublime?
Even when I think something is perfectly done, 100% of the time there is criticism here: scoffing that xyz did this already or abc is coming out with this same thing soon etc.

I hung around the local computer store and lurked on BBSs in the early Apple 2 era, and people with serious computers (16 bit, S100 bus, CP/M) definitely scoffed at this 8-bit toy with not even a floppy drive.
People will scoff at anything new. It doesn't predict much about its eventual success.

We'd be too busy arguing over Bill Gates' 1976 letter to hobbyists about pirating Micro-Soft Altair BASIC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists