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Telehack Re-Creates the Internet of 25 Years Ago
saccade.com writes "Telehack.com has meticulously re-created the Internet as it appeared to a command line user over a quarter century ago. Drawing on material from Jason Scott's TextFiles.com, the text-only world of the 1980s appears right in your browser. If you want to show somebody what the Arpanet looked like (you didn't call it the "Internet" until the late '80s) this is it. Using the 'finger' command and seeing familiar names from decades ago (some, sadly, ghosts now) sends a chill down your spine."
And a bit farther back it was possible to fix a computer yourself (*really* fix it, not just swap out a CPU or motherboard) - I remember helping to troubleshoot an old DEC PDP-10 (still alive way after its time) with a voltmeter - much of the logic was on wirewrapped cards. You could see the bug fixes because they were in different colored wires. I even had to enter the bootloader on the front panel register switches (just enough to get it to read the rest of the code from the paper tape reader).
You are right, the tools have become a lot more powerful, and you do not have to dive into the nitty-gritty details anymore to get something done quickly.
However, there's a few downsides as well. My kids (lawn, get off, yeah yeah..) are interested in computers but simply cannot appreciate what goes on under the hood. They have never heard of accumulators, shift registers and carry flags. These same kids will have to advance the technology in a few years time, when they are in R&D labs. I can't imagine they do a good job at making optimal use of the resources that they will have at their disposal by then, simply because they do not understand what goes on inside.
The tools make it easy, but they cause lots of bloat. When I built my own CP/M computer, a buddy designed a graphics card for it and wrote some basic CAD software in the 32K RAM we had. I designed a mouse circuit for it and wrote a mouse driver in about 50 bytes or so. It truly disgusts me when today I buy a mouse and it comes with a 20 Megabyte driver set. That's more than the entire operating system 15 years ago. What is so bloody special about a mouse that it needs 20 million bytes of instructions to function? Left, right, up down, button 1,2,3 up and down. What else??
No-one cares about this anymore. A waste of resources. What a shame.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB