What a time to be alive as a coder...
Now there's a glut of content. Will another opportunity ever appear again? In both cases, the opportunity didn't look good at first.
With AI we might go through an era of sameness and/or slop leaving the door open for something more genuine. Everything is cyclical.
Edit: Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model.
Steve wrote a lot of software for the first computer I had access to which was my father's Tandy Color Computer. We didn't have much money so we couldn't afford luxuries like a disk drive and commercial software on a ROM pack was a rare gift.
One of the handful of ROM paks we had was a game called "Popcorn". It's opening screen proudly displays "By Steve Bjork" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSL4dGhJhHo ). As an 8 year old kid, I thought it was a funny name. I'd often call my little sister a "bjork" and she would predictably yell back "no, you're the bjork!". It was a bit of a family joke for some years.
Fast forward 25ish years and I started participating in "retro computing", reliving some childhood memories and had fun writing some new software for my first love. I participated on the community forums, helped with some open source projects and eventually found that Mr. Bjork was still active and creating projects for this old computer. I traveled to the annual "last" cocofest where Tandy nerds still gather and got to meet him. He was extremely kind and we had interesting discussions. We even collaborated on some projects. It was surreal to be working with this "legend" from my early childhood.
Sadly, Steve passed away in 2023. He was truly a sweet and capable man who gave a lot to the community for years after any commercial opportunity had passed.
afavour•5h ago
ldargin•2h ago