When did computers stop being fun?

Solo and small-group computer projects used to be in a sweet spot of opportunity: feasible yet interesting to others. But opportunity-space is limited and fills.

To me a more important question is: where can people 10-30 years old bootstrap themselves on interesting and useful problems? They have intelligence and energy but not resources or connections (mostly), and all that potential human capital will all be wasted if they don't have any tractable and fruitful domains. (We don't have to worry about those with resources, connections, or luck, but they're a small minority already tethered to value flows, in little danger of being under-developed.)

My concern in particular is that tech companies spent big on building free languages and tools (yes, you used to have to pay for compilers, IDE's, databases...) in order to reduce input costs of them and their customers. If AI already minimizes labor costs (both the work and the discovery and training of residual human talent), there's no reason to subsidize that self-training, and likely fewer portable skills (across more isolated tech stacks), further locking employees in, reducing cross-pollination (formerly within the valley).

Individual opportunity is shrinking. Young people feel it. Old people feel it too, even if they have bagfuls of tech stocks.

Microcontrollers are fun. The specs of modern MCs are similar to home computers 30 years ago. The community aspect is there. They’re cheap, too.

I remember the moment distinctly, it was the winter early in the year 2000. We had just survived the Y2K incident and I was in a VW camper van roving around, at the particular moment I was visiting a Twisted Python developer in the San Jose area.

I called it "losing my immortality"; I no longer felt like I had infinite time to just code for the fun of it. I just wanted to produce things. I wanted the result, not the journey.

I was just talking about it with my son yesterday, he's 17 and I'm 55. We were talking about the new Commodore 64 and how it was trying to bring the joy back to computing. He love programming and I'm trying to support that. But it looks very different for me than him.

He is loving th craft of programming, which is great! I remember that, and I think that will serve him well. I'm feeling the same joy in the results I get through using AI.

I feel this a lot too these days. The only place the fun seems to remain for me is in Linux and in devices out of China, that you can hack and experiment with — like the Anbernic consoles, or the Xteink X4, or the little mp3 player DAP things, or the Sipeed NanoKVM devices, or the Supernote. The Steam Deck probably sits in this niche too, now I think about it.

Alongside the purpose they serve, all of them can be trivially broken into and re-tooled however you like — and for me at least, that’s where a lot of fun lies in computers. When it comes to mainline desktops now, everything is incredibly expensive and deflating.

Personal computers are still fun for me, although it has waxed and waned over the years since I got my first 8 bit computer in the 1980s.

Linux kep it fun. Even during a time when I worked with windows professionally I always had a Linux distribution installed somewhere.

As a short history of fun in no particular order:

First time I got XFree86 working after having to endlessly configure display settings.

Using Yggdrasil to do remote support for Sun systems.

Hacking on a cd-rom driver to get mine to work.

Building a media server on an NSLU2. My media server is still called “the slug” despite being on an RPi now. At one point my kids had repurposed PS2s in their rooms with all their favourite shows at their fingertips. Sounds lame now but back then it was magic.

Moving all my dev tools to Linux after finally realising they all ran worse on windows, including .NET core

Endless fiddling with wine to get games to start, now completely solved but it was educational at the time.

Wacky shenanigans with wifi drivers and binary blobs back when wifi was still emerging.

I don’t know how you get the spark back once it’s lost though, I’d only suggest that the reward centre in your dome doesn’t fire properly unless you’ve been challenged and worked hard to solve whatever you’re faced with.

Help the younger generations find the same fun you did. That's where satisfaction is often found as we age.

> Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.

You just need to find the right application for your skills to reignite it, e. g. a side project. There are also plenty of awesome books out there to dive into new topics (I like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books).

I've noticed the same thing. IMO, the heyday of computing coincided with the peak of WiReD Magazine. Around 1995 interconnected computers and the WWW bootstrapped a revolution in spreading+sharing information that seemed certain to reshape cultural norms, organically, bottom up, for the better. It seemed the world would never be the same. Heady times. That sense of optimism lasted until the computer unicorns morphed into monopolies. After that the roles reversed and all us net denizens became unicorn fodder. It's hard to stay upbeat after you realize you're no longer in charge and are constantly being manipulated wherever you go online.

IMO it's still fun to hand-write C and Makefiles targeting an extremely resource-constrained device that's connected to an oscilloscope and a gunshot-wound worth of capacitance on your bench. YMMV

Over the last 30 years the culture and power has made a gradual shift from 100% pure hobbyists to 4% hobbyists, 48% scammers/predators, and 48% commercial.

You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously.

2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly user hostile, which was the symbolic turning point for me.

When you turn 30

I think once they stopped being "Personal Computers", they stopped being fun. The most interesting era was from the 70s until the mid 90s, before MSFT completely grabbed the home computer market.

After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.

They’re still fun, but you have to be really good at understanding what your idea of fun is, listening to that voice, and not falling prey to what other people/companies with an agenda are trying to push on you as fun (when it’s just crap designed to fill their pockets).

99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.

Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.

It coincides significantly with YC, Zuckerberg, and Amazon. Internet is becoming soulles by the day.

For me it's the advent of LLMs. AI is boring.

Computer fun is inversely proportional to number of investors.

They’re still fun? Why not? It’s more magical than ever now, even if it’s changed a lot from the “glory days” which is nostalgic thinking mostly.

Computers are amazing because they are still open doors, to doing so much, to endless creativity.

As for me, really enjoying the wide diversity of bespoke well considered creature comforts people are building with Home Assistant. I love the various casting technologies & how it finally gave us a networked ubiquitous & pervasive cross device opening (very excited for Open Screen protocol).

My area has a pretty active group of people doing LoRa and now wifi halow meshing, which is so cool to see: actual person to person connectivity.

I love seeing the huge variety of apps being built around atmospheric computing. Having one ur-connected Personal Data Server that we are sovereign over that hosts all kinds of different online apps is incredible, and it's wild what people are cooking up. The pace, the care, the community, now that we have a omni-purpose social networking software that respects the users is amazing, breathtaking. https://atstore.fyi

The whole agent era is amazing, with incredible agentic and/or vibe coding things on demand. We can learn and see so much more than before. People are going wild building systems they access remotely by phone, by ssh, by voice, that have so much on tap, that run such incredible and affordable models (deepseek flash rocking the house). Computing's form is in total review.

> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)

Hahaha. Ok. You destroyed your spark a long time ago & are never ever ever getting it back with an attitude like that. You've grey bearded every drop of glamor out from the world if that's what you've let yourself think. That is the corporatized atittude you just decried! Dry and cut.

> Any suggestion on getting it back?

You have built all manners of walls and inhibitions that keep you from being involved, from considering possibility, from seeing progress. I have technical things I think are amazing that I've shared. But you need to work on tearing down the walls that you have walled yourself into, and finding a will within yourself that is able to engage the world.

Get a uConsole!

Or any of the trending variants.

Little computers are still fun.

Get back into computers that have limited ability but are fun to use, such as the MNT Reform.

Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant is really fun, especially if you try to create your own self-hosted voice assistant and connected speaker system

When you got old :)

I know what you mean, I think that happened when Corporations took over the internet.

Plus, when Smart Phones came out, most were locked down. If they were not locked down I think it would have been lots of fun for the young hacking them. Now, almost all devices are in the process of following the Cell Phone Trend.

But some fun can be had with the *BSDs and some Linux Distros, hopefully that can continue in spite of these new Age Verification Laws.

Seems the young of today cannot hack, break, fix computers now, they seem to be on a Assembly Line to Corporate boredom.

loving is laborious

It was fun when the Commodore Amiga came out and outshone the Macintosh, until the Mac II came out, of course. But the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST had emulators for all kinds of computers.

Of course, when Commodore went bankrupt, the fun ended. They didn't innovate or market like the Apple Macintosh or IBM PC Clones.

You can still program in BASIC with PC-BASIC: https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ BASIC was always fun to use.

>Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.

You got old. The thing you loved became work. That's when most things stop being fun. Don't know what to tell you. Maybe collect stamps or something.

I think it's natural to lose enthusiasm over time when a joy becomes a job.

"I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)"

I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.

If you found joy because of the craft itself, low-level hands-on stuff (breadboards, esp32s, soldering, ..) can scratch that itch too.

When smartphones took over computing and landed in everyone's pockets, and the shareholders realized they have access to every single eyeball on Earth, and so the squeezing of tech for profit began. The big watershed moment for me was when Google Reader was killed off; it signaled the end of the web for users.

How I feel about programming is often a reflection of how I feel about my own internal world because it continues to be a part of my identity. Once I found a job that valued my desire to actually build things, things started to sort themselves out rather quickly.

Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.

Reminds me of winamp skins. Such wacky designs would be unthinkable today.

Im changing targets. I've started to hack around with a play.date devices. It's pretty cool.

Every industry has a regression to the mean such that a normal workforce can support it. This is, good thing, but it makes the commercial side very boring (which is also a good thing).

With AI, I think makes it more permissible to do odd and unique things that see fun. Like, why not?

Ignoring any cultural dynamics that may be at play: maybe sometime after you started getting paid to do it. Personally, I find it enjoyable relative to other jobs, but I've lost most of the recreational enjoyment since I started making a living from it.

I'm still having a ton of fun with computers, even moreso with the advent of halfway usable AI.

Being able to plug a little intelligence into software with little effort makes many things a lot more convenient. One of my favorites is having an LLM monitoring a long running task and doing something about it if something goes off the rails.

The hurdle to seeing what an idea what look like in implementation has also decreased a lot, so I don't have to worry about picking something small enough to finish over a weekend or two.

It's kind of touched on elsewhere, but when phones became computers.

Suddenly it's an always on resource that needs value extracting.

It's even worse nowadays, post COVID, with the insane hustle culture. I mean, yeah, these strats worked when it was the odd person doing it. But now.. nah thanks, you're trying to play on my basic human nature.

You want fun? Build shit. Stop being precious about vibe coding, it's a spectrum, nothing is too complex now.. learn from the LLM if you don't want to just let it run with the code.

Shit.. it's fun to finally build out a good portion of the never ending ideas list (and to realise half of those ideas just aren't worth the effort)

The 80s and 90s were fun, with Atari, Commodore, DEC, SGI, Sun, HP, Next, even IBM all going at it. I guess widespread Wintel and internet access, plus Google going for commodity hardware for their servers sealed the deal - consolidation was the way forward, competition was dead.

Thanks for the great question! I think they used to be so much fun because they were an unexplored frontier.

Perhaps we need a new frontier?

The internet and computing started to eat the world. Monetization lead to enshittification.. social issues popping everywhere. What used to be a smaller things with lots of promise ended up as the bedsoil for a special kind of hell, and it makes me want to stay away from mainstream webdev / computing for a while (unless it's for a real benefit for some people or society)

When you were young the internet (or substitute for whatever actually was the new thing) was the new thing, you loved it, you loved trying to push it to it's limits, what can it do? why don't I try this? I can break this! fun!

Now you are older, AI is the new thing, young people[0] are having a blast, pushing it to it's limits, what can it do?! they're hacking. But you're older so you're not interested in shiny new thing.

[0] and some older people to be clear, I admire them most, they keep their mind and curiosity young

> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own

> Any suggestion on getting it back?

1. Take a break. I don't mean stop working, just fill your free time with other stuff, but if you don't code at work, it is a bonus. Try other things. I was in a position you describe, and I took a break, dived into studying psychology, you can choose anything you like, like keeping stray cat population in your neighborhood fed and sufficiently stroked behind their ears. Or can you play a harp? You can learn it, you know. (Speaking about psychology: your condition is a middle age crisis. Self-realization is done, all immediate goals are reached, you've got more freedom to choose next goals, and everything is increasingly becoming a routine. Nothing bad is happening, you just need to adapt. You will adapt, you don't need to do anything special, it will happen all by itself. Just exercise your new freedom a little, and in a couple of years new goals will find you.)

2. Stop thinking of important things. Had you read "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman!"? If not, I suggest to read just for fun of it, but among all the jokes Feynman describes a period in his life when he felt like you. He couldn't find any good ideas what he could do in physics. At some point he took a seemingly silly problem, and solved it. And he came back to physics with it, later he discovered the differential equations from that silly problem in another "serious" problem and eventually got a Nobel Prize.

The moral is: you are overthinking it. You are looking for ideas for programs but you use too narrow filters. Like the problem should match your skills. Or the problem should be important enough to work on it.

So just take a break and look for some interesting problem. If you find any, you find some other way to entertain yourself, so not a big deal. Just stop obsessing about it and I'm sure it will come naturally.

They didn't. There was a bit of an interval between the days of diversity - the Commodores, Sinclairs, Ataris, the CP/M machines, everything from build-your-own to sleek futuristic designs, etc - and the free software revolution which saw Linux and the BSDs cement themselves as the future in some or other form. Now? Software is free and open, hardware is cheap and plentiful, hardware hacking is back, if you want to create something which has not been created before there's a fair chance of success. If you succeed you can easily publish your designs, others get to pick them up and improve upon them and publish their improvements. Computers are more capable than ever, just stay away from the walled gardens and the shiny traps created by the likes of Microsoft and Apple and Google and you're free to do what you want.

BBSes were fun, and I had a good time exploring the mid 90s internet, between Gopher, FTP sites, Usenet, and eventually websites, there was always something worth checking out.

I don't know when it stopped being fun, I don't recall hating Facebook in 2008, but I do know that it had pissed me off on more than one occasion by 2012.

I think community building is what's been missing or done badly for the last 15+ years. I can find a few subreddits where I like the community, but Discord and similar have never worked for me. I don't think that live chat suits my temperament. I also suspect that up and down votes have been corrosive for social media in general.

I don't know that you can get the feeling back without either building and maintaining your own communities using the tools the corporatized Internet makes available to you, or finding and participating in the communities that you like. I do know that five years ago when the fediverse was a topic of conversation that there was a thread that content moderation and curation was going to be the only valuable work to be done in social media.

tl;dr: I suspect it's a community building and maintenance problem, not a coding problem.

Not what most folks here are saying but the thing that brought the spark back for me was going harder into small software, not pivoting to hardware. Tiny Android apps, do one thing well, no team, shipped to actual users on Play Store within a month or two. Most fun I've had with code in a while.

> Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own

Wait until you get older. I did! And I have identified over the years tons of applications that would help seniors that nobody gives one iota of attention to, because "no get rich quick money in it"

The simplest example of all. Shopping.I can't read price labels on the lowest shelf [0], and as for use-by date and ingredients, my OE nearsighted as hell lenses can't read any of them. Seniors who didn't have a career in engineering and computers get scammed regularly, get information from the internet that is either garbage or outright malicious, the list goes on and on. I am using my remaining time to address these.

And how about students? Everything changed overnight. Rather than enriching them, they are using AI to cheat and avoid thinking and learning. What would you say to them? What would you teach? How would your life and work experience benefit them?

Way back when, I planned some after school labs (there was money for such things) where kids would go out and collect data, and then deal with it collectively (talking to other kids and instructors, not "Professor Claude", who didn't exist in those days, and if their computers were inadequate, give them bootable linux media (like Knoppix) or just time remotely accessible.

Hey, I'm excited at 77.

These things didn't happen because I never had a network. Great things happen when there's a Jobs and a Woz. Not in isolation.

Needs change. Invent that REALLY REAL exoskeleton now, the robotic "fetch my meds" robotic assistant now, and they'll be ready when you're ready for them.

[0] Only Trader Joe's provides big, legible labels.

It’s hard for me to know if it’s the computers that changed or my stage of life.

I think they become less fun sometimes during the later stage Web 2.0 era as everything shifted toward services. For most, computers became a thin client to access services on the Internet. To me, this isn’t very fun. The computer becomes an appliance to access services rather than one used to run programs that can be customized and tailored to the user. Of course that local experience can still exist, but only for users who are very intentional. For shared experiences, it’s only for users whose friends are also intentional. This intentionality usually means doing a lot of extra work. This work was not an issue when the pay off of new functionality was there, but is harder to justify when it’s often less functionality for more work… the main upside being freedom and agency over the experience.

Seemingly every service being a front to collect and sell data also makes things less fun. There is a certain level of trust that needs to exist when running software and that trust relationship has been broken, even by real companies. It makes it hard to trust anything, which pushes me away from trying new things that might be fun.

This change coincided with my transition to adulthood, where priorities shift. It’s impossible to say if I’d still find computers fun in 2026 if I was 19 again, but my gut tells me I’d be a lot less interested.

If there is a path back, I think it might be along the lines of Pewdiepie’s newfound love of Linux. He seems to be having a ball.

For me the price of components rising increases the barrier to entry into enthusiast computer hobbies. If they stabilise at the current price long-term then I'll be pretty sad.

As for coding in particular, I think it's natural to move on from certain hobbies. I don't have the same hobbies I did 5 years ago, and recreational coding has come and gone for me in waves.

At the moment I've got a fun project where I'm learning something new (local-first apps, podcasts), so the excitement is there, but I wasn't coding recreationally at the same rate a few months ago when I didn't have a goal.

Find a hobby that's fun for you, even if it's not coding.

If you don't care for software development, I would suggest you to try your hand at self hosting. I am having a ton of fun with it.

It's easy and fairly cheap to get started. I bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex to be a home server, and I am getting a lot of mileage out of it.

There's all sort of applications you can self host nowadays, it's highly cuatomizable, and can be extremely useful on top of it.

If you have an old computer lying around unused you can even try turning it into a home server to see if it suits your tastes.

At least for me was something highly addictive.

Once every single thing connected to the internet (iPhone + 10 years?). Tech products, software, video games, etc. were new and exciting ways to solve problems. Now every single thing is a way to monetize, steal your data, or lock you into a platform to do those things later.

when Java was introduced