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Computer Folklore, Circa 1984
savetz writes "The full text of the classic 1984 computer book Digital Deli, The Comprehensive, User-Lovable Menu of Computer Lore, Culture, Lifestyles and Fancy, is now on the Web. (Autstralian mirror) A wonderful look at technology culture in the golden age of the microcomputer. 20 other old computer books are at the site, too."
Wow. One page every few minutes. And users complain because their laser printer takes 20-30 seconds to warm up...
I know what you mean and when you think about it, aren't there times that we still think "God, can't this thing go any faster?!", knowing full well that had we used said device (eg. printers, modems, CPUs, storage, etc) say 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, we would be waiting a LOT longer than we do now.
It's a matter of perception, much like watching a boiling pot.
Join the TWIT army now!
1984 is not that old, the Mac and IBM PC were already out, for heaven's sake! 1984 is long after real classics like the Kim-1, Sinclair ZX80, and Apple II appeared. The real golden age of microcomputing was when you could fit the entire OS, basic interpreter and maybe a game or two into 8 K of RAM. Back then, a budding nerd could easily understand what every single chip and instruction did.
Real men use PEEK, POKE, and GOTO!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
He sure was dead on about the future. Quote Below:
They call us pirates and worse. They lock up their programs behind hardware and software schemes. They set the minions of the law upon us. And still we flourish by our wiles.
Ahoy, ye microlubbers: to pirate a program is not to steal, but to liberate knowledge. We don't take money or goods from anyone; we merely free up information. Most of us don't profit from our buccaneering activities; instead, we share the wealth with our fellow computer users.
The software moguls have only themselves to blame for our cracking open the bars to their programs. If they didn't charge a king's ransom for disks that cost a pittance to duplicate, there would be little incentive for us to practice our skills. There would be no need for them to protect their programs if software were no more expensive than what you and I can afford to pay.
We are no longer in the Dark Ages of personal software, when so few people used computers that program development costs had to be defrayed by high unit prices. Now so many microcomputers are in use that a program should cost no more than a lightweight paperback novel. Instead, we are paying illuminated manuscript prices.
Maybe someday the software publishers will understand how they're killing off the golden goose. But until that time, be warned: there will be many a pirate's flag on the software horizon.
JOLLY ROGER
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I suspect that taking a break every 30 minutes would seem a lot more reasonable back then, when monitors were hardly as ergonomic as they are now.
You think a 60Hz vertical refresh is bad? I'm sure that would've been luxurious 20 years ago.
The computers and the software were simply, it seems. And that simplicity made for more fun.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
The Beeb ran at 2 MHz. Or to be precise, we can go to the very book you cite, page 494:
I agree that the book is excellent. When I first got it, I read it from cover to cover on a long coach journey. "Ooh look, if I grab that vector I can extend the VDU driver capabilities!"
I've always felt that the BBC micro architecture was the most elegant and powerful to appear on any 8-bit machine. The first time I used an IBM PC (1984 - it had a cassette port and BASIC in ROM :-), I couldn't understand how a company like IBM could cock it up so badly, when Acorn had produced something so good.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Now I play with computers for a living, and it ain't nearly as much fun: who can keep an entire computer's architecture in their head anymore?
This is not my sandwich.
Yeah, a bit like that story where some guy went to a mountain and threw a ring in some fire.
Sometimes the best part of a story is in the telling, you unimaginative sod.
I know lots of programmers who have programmed in constrained environments yet produce awful code for modern systems. They're lazy. They want to be lazy. They don't care about elegance or correctness, they just want to get things done.
As someone who cares, it makes me sad.
Especially when the lazy people are those who the software industry caters to. Consider Java - weak language, huge library.
As for reliability; djb's prize is still unclaimed, as proof that people can design and implement things carefully enough that they work well.
Of course often even those few people who want to do things well don't get the chance because of dumb requirements and deadlines.
It amazes me how thoroughly 1984's personal computer futurists missed the idea of an internet.
They didn't. An excellent book published in the UK during the early 80's was Anthony Hyman's "The Coming of the Chip". This book was published at the time when integrated circuits were becoming large enough to contain entire processors on a single chip. The book was split into 12 chapters, each of which dealt with different aspects of the revolution:
1. Introduction: The coming of the chip (Flat screens replace CRT's)
2. Development of the chip
3. Revolution in Communications (Definition of a 'wired society', where everyone has access to "wide-band" communications at home. Being able to print out documents at home).
4. The electronic office (Outsourcing of back-room processing work across the world).
5. Robots at work
6. The shape of shopping to come (Automated inventory control).
7. Machines for living in (The wired home).
8. The cashless society (Electronic money and remote transactions)
9. Cure by chip? (Expert systems for medical diagnosis)
10. Under surveillance (The dangers of permanent storage of financial transactions and CCTV system data).
11. The computerised classroom (Multimedia systems for education)
12. Into the 21st century
"Early in the twenty-first century:
To see the news you switch on the screen. Newspapers ceased printing as paper and distribution become too expensive. Besides, news coverage on the electronic newspaper is so much better. You do not have to wait for newstime, as on the ordinary television; it is called up at will on the optical fibre video link. News, still comes from "The Times", "The Guardian", "The Mirror", "The Sun" and also from news centres, which succeeded the old newspapers when paper was replaced by electronic news."