Remember When IT Was Fun?
I got a reply to the Mac email from David Maunder, who's spent 17 years in IT at Liverpool Plains Shire Council out in Quirindi. He said something that stuck with me: "I feel as though the last of the real fun in IT left the scene ten years ago."
Then he followed it up with a list of memories that made me grin at my phone for about five minutes straight. Here's David:
"Waiting some eight hours for the 4 meg of DOOM 1 to download from id's site in America. And the entire hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay that came from it. Connecting PCs back to back with paperclips in serial ports for network Doom."
He talked about installing Office 4.3 from something like 36 floppy disks on a computer way down the paddock. Pushing Norton Ghost through 9600 baud wireless radios across kilometres of open country because that's all they had. Mates lining up outside Harvey Norman in 1995 to be first to get their hands on Windows 95. And building his first HTML website in Notepad, hosted on Angelfire.
Reading David's email brought it all flooding back for me too.
I've been in this industry since 2001. My early years were computer builds, weekend drives to computer markets with mates hunting for cheaper hardware, and learning how things actually worked by pulling them apart. Dialup Duke Nukem. Quake on the computers at high school. Warcraft 1 on floppy disk. Learning pkzip and pkunzip on the command line so I could split Warcraft across three floppies. Building my first website on Geocities, optimising every graphic in Macromedia Fireworks to fit in the 5MB of hosting space I had. Tying up the family phone line 24/7 for downloads. Getting mp3s on Napster.
None of that was efficient. None of it was optimised. Nobody was measuring our engagement metrics while we figured out IRQ conflicts. We were just solving problems because solving problems was fun.
Something shifted. I don't think it was one moment. It was gradual. Software stopped being something you bought and started being something you rented. Updates stopped being exciting and started being mandatory. The computer went from being a thing you understood to a thing you managed. And "managing IT" became less about making things work and more about making sure your licences didn't expire.
David's right. The fun did leave. But I don't think it's gone forever.
What I find exciting about where things are heading now is that it feels a bit like those early days again. AI tools, open-source alternatives, the whole ecosystem starting to crack open. Not the specific technology. The feeling. The sense that you can actually build things, try things, break things, and figure it out as you go. The tools are different but the energy is similar.
I spent last weekend getting an AI agent to autonomously write and deploy code on a Mac mini sitting on my desk. No floppy disks involved. But the feeling of watching it work for the first time? Same as watching that first page load on Geocities.
If you've got your own IT memories from the early days, I'd genuinely love to hear them. Just reply to this email. I might share a few in the next one if you're happy for me to.
-- Jez
Recently built
NCEATA (Newcastle Creative Embroiderers and Textile Artists) is a Hunter region textile art community group that's been running workshops, exhibitions, and monthly meetings since 1979. Forty-five years of keeping a craft and a community alive. The new site carries that same spirit: straightforward, welcoming, and built to last.
If someone you know would get something out of this, feel free to forward it. And just reply if you want to chat — I read every one.