Slashdot Mirror
Computer De-Evolution: Awesome Features We've Lost
jfruhlinger writes "If you listened to tech marketing departments, you'd believe that advances in computers have been a nonstop march upwards. But is that really true? What about all the great features early hackers had in the '70s and '80s that are now hard to find or lost forever, like clicky keyboards and customizable screen height? This article looks at much beloved features that lost the evolutionary war."
Devolution doesn't have a meaning, because evolution doesn't mean changes for the better.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
The reset switch/button!
A real, mechanical 'off' switch, on the front of the machine, gets an honorable mention.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Not only are they still working fine, typing this on a Model M, but Unicomp still makes them. You can buy a brand new one if you want right now.
On Windows PCs at least, the BIOS will perform a hard power-off if you hold down the "soft" off button for 5 seconds.
At least I got to read the first two pages before they cratered...
You miss Turbo Pascal? Commodore 64's flat, unprotected memory model? Clicky keyboards with the CTRL key where tab is now, because it's somehow impossible to hit one handed CTRL keystroke combinations with it in the lower left corner?
Was this written by Andy Rooney's sysadmin?
Not currently able to view more than just the first page but... clicky keyboards aren't really gone. Cherry Blue MX keyboards have been on the rise of late actually as the 'Gamer' market has been quite attracted to Mechanical switch keyboards the past two years. Likewise, "function" keys on the left of the keyboard space still exists on numerous boards; e.g. the Logitech G1* keyboard series. The macro buttons placed there default to F keys, but you can obviously change them to work either as a key-combo or direct macro if you wish.
The original Amiga had a keyboard garage: the machine itself was raise a little off the desk, just enough for the keyboard to slide underneath it.
I loved every single thing about that computer. The Amiga 1200 was fine too. The Amiga 500 was great, but Commodore made their first big design snafu there - they put the Zorro expansion slot on the wrong side of the computer and upside down, so you couldn't use Amiga 1000 peripherals without also flipping them upside down.
(Still not as bad as the "PCMCIA" slot on the A600.)
Other things I miss: TUIs like Project Oberon and Symbolics Lisp. Hell, Lisp in general is now such a niche it's sad. "Real" Unix - lots of little programs that do one thing and do them well. cat -n considered harmful and all that.
Sorry Dimwit - please don't DCMA me bro...
Nullius in verba
Readable websites that don't have inline ads in them, unlike the article linked.
This is hardly the same as a switch which disconnects the computer's power supply from its source.
My box has a power switch on the back (on the power supply). Works. Yes, you have to reach an entire 18 to 24 inches back, but it's not that difficult. :) And I'd rather have it there than have it on the front where I'd accidentally turn it off...
But I've _never_ hit the close button by accident.
Look at the mobile space, being touted (rightly, IMO) as the next great growth space in computing. The fundamental advantage we've had in computing up to this point is actively being attacked with walled gardens.
"Yes, you have to reach an entire 18 to 24 inches"
when I said that to my wife she was impressed
proper on/off switches on PSU's not the stupid rocker switches (or even worse no switch at all)
the greatest work station epiphany i recently had involved turning my 9:16 monitor 90 degrees
great for reading code and long articles
unless the article is stretched out in little snippets over a number of pages, like the article this story links to. i hate that. and apparently its for advertising purposes. how are advertising purposes served by chasing me away from finishing the article?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A shortcut that has aways been on my gnome desktop is the kill window shortcut. click the button, my mouse turns into a set of cross-hairs, click the offending window, and its gone immediately. the ability to use ps -e and kill -9 are a big reason i stay on Linux. just one of the ways that linux will let me have full control over my environment. for better or worse.
The people mentionned in the article need
- a tiling window manager
- a proper editor (whining about not being able to open the same file at different points is ridiculous. vim/emacs, pick one, learn how to use it, you won't leave it after that)
- a mechanical keyboard
- a command line ( am I the only one that laughed upon reading that a GUI equivalent of kill such as the task manager is slow ?)
- a hex editor
I have not had the opportunity to use turbo pascal, but they are a lot of scripting/programming (the line is quite thin heh) languages that are very poweful, fast and easy to use (Python comes to mind).
All in all I don't think all those features mentionned in the article are missing, it's just the authors that don't know about an equivalent tool, or are too lazy to find one. ...
And to finish, a little trollbait:
Oddly, many of them miss features after they moved on Windows
This article seemed more like nostalgia than an actual list of good features we've lost. The keys on your keyboard aren't clicky anymore, how does that mean keyboards are now worse? Seems too subjective to classify as a step backward.
On Windows, you can just ignore the maximize button because double clicking any window's title bar maximizes the window or restores it from maximized state. This handily separates the [X] close button from the [_] minimize button (called "iconify" in the article). Mac OS X, on the other hand, puts the yellow minimize button next to the red close button.
I miss the subtle chirping sounds that my old MiniScribe MFM 20MB hard drive made.
These same sounds have been used as computer sounds effects in countless movies and video games such as Doom, and Unreal.
Bring back the Turbo button!
seriously... everything on that list is something retarded that was only ever there because we didn't have easily producible better ways of doing things.
"I really miss the 'clicky' IBM Model M keyboards from the mid and late '80"
You can still get these
"which could kill an accidentally triggered program, along with the Unix Control-C and kill -9 for command line Unix. I'm not sure if anything exists that can do that as quickly at the GUI level. "
Right-click & "force quit" using OSX' dock, or CMD-q
"XEDIT had the ability to restrict the file to a part, and have all editing commands, such as 'go to top/search and replace/select to bottom,' only work on that part of the file."
Use Jedit.
"This let me write macros that were globally available."
Services in OSX.
"Almost 30 years ago, there was a "see" program for the IBM PC -- I don't recall whether it was a .com or .exe file -- that allowed users to view, search and subsequently edit the bytes comprising executable images."
It's called a hex editor, there thousands of 'em.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
From TFA:
"What I miss most are keyboards that have some 'omph' to them, and software that makes use of keyboard shortcuts. I really miss the 'clicky' IBM Model M keyboards from the mid and late '80s, for instance. I can type 150+ words per minute and I can move my fingers across a keyboard faster than I can move my hand to a mouse, move the cursor, click, and put my fingers back on the keyboard. I really really really miss customizable keyboard shortcuts."
WHAT???? You have keyboard shortcuts now, windows has the Windows button and the alt key! For both Windows and Mac you have a ton of shortcut apps that give you access to keyboard shortcuts. Apps that take shortened text you type frequently and expands it to a long word. They are all there, they just moved to third party apps. This Eric Loyd is a dipshit if he misses keyboard shortcuts... go buy a $2 app that gives them back to you you idiot!
More:
""The main feature I miss on today's keyboards is having FUNCTION keys (F1, F2, etc) on the left of the main key area, and a CONTROL key in the middle of the left-side column of keys (so it goes from top to bottom: ~/TAB/CTRL/SHIFT/ALT). There are a number of CTRL+F-key and ALT+F-key combinations that can quickly and easily done with one hand in this configuration without looking"
I agree the layout of the keyboard in this instance is good, but if you have fully customizable shortcuts at your command thru any number of apps, design something that makes sense to you. Don't assign your shortcut to Alt-F12 if you need two hands and want one hand. Undo/cut/copy/paste were brilliantly designed, take a lesson from that and design the same keyboard shortcut for yourself.
More:
"There is a programmable keyboard available -- the CVT Avant Stellar,"
Ah fuck me it's a slashvertisement.
More:
"what he misses is the convenience of DOS's CONTROL-C and CONTROL-Q which could kill an accidentally triggered program, along with the Unix Control-C and kill -9 for command line Unix. I'm not sure if anything exists that can do that as quickly at the GUI level."
I can agree with this, a keyboard in general is the fastest input device we have, but this is a clever deception, trying to say that just because a GUI is slower it's not evolving. Not true. Once you know what you are doing, and have to perform a repetitive task, a keyboard is always faster. A GUI, however, is always easier if you don't necessarily know what you are looking for or know what you are doing. Remember images and motions towards and area of the screen is easier for a lot of people, rather than trying to remember to put a -9 after the kill, or remembering what grep, awk, and cron do. If you have to look up a command every few minutes, it's not faster, and if you can remember the action faster to do what you want, for you it's faster. GUIs opened up the world of computing to many more people, and that's a fact, because it was easier to remember and perform the tasks they wanted to perform.
More:
"The CMU Andrew Toolkit had very complex scrollbars that took a while to master,"
Stop right there, everything in this paragraph is invalidated by the fact that thos was "complex" and "took a while to master." A GUI is supposed to make things simpler, because not everyone has time to master complex scroll bars. If it takes me a half hour to figure out scrolling in a GUI, it's not necessarily faster when all I have to do is scan down a page looking for a simple paragraph. Complex is not necessarily evolution, and making something simplified is not necessary a regression. Simplicity could speed everyone up as a whole.
The article then degenerates into a bunch of technobabble about a bunch of features developers use to have, but just about every one of them has a modern equivalent they could get by just finding and downloading third party software, most which is probably free. Sure, notepad sucks, notepad is not meant to be an advanced text editor! How long did it take you to figure that
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
It's nothing more than a bunch of old farts complaining about how the old days were better, when in fact most of that they want is still available or entirely unnecessary. Keyboards for example. I for one prefer new keyboards. I hated the old clicky style, but as others have shown, they are available for those who want them. Complaining about the scroll bar and not being able to click in the window to recenter? That might have been nice... in the days before the mouse wheel.
Look at the mobile space [...] The fundamental advantage we've had in computing up to this point is actively being attacked with walled gardens.
What walled garden? If you have an Android-powered device, and you didn't buy it from the AT&T store, you can turn on "Unknown sources" and install any program you want, just like every other PDA since the PalmPilot.
I'm typing on a clicky keyboard right now. Made by Unicomp. It's not *quite* as durable as an old IBM keyboard (which could stun an ox), but it's still pretty solid.
Not to insult those who like old-school tech, but this article really sounds like it was written by the views of a bunch of dinosaurs. On p3 someone laments the death of xedit, a non-GUI text editor with search/replace, go to top/bottom, and so on. I mean, has he never heard of Vim? I'd be intrigued to hear of any features xedit had that Vim doesn't, or you couldn't write a keybinding for in emacs (not that I delve in such magic). There's also this gem of a quote: "Whenever I read an article online, be it in Adobe Reader, a text editor, or a web browser, I try to get an uninterrupted paragraph on the screen, fail, curse, and move on, knowing that online reading used to be a far less turbulent and far more graceful experience before popular and simple displaced complex and useful." Adobe Reader (along with MS Word and others) supports full-screen mode, allowing an uninterrupted view. And with monitors being so huge now it's not exactly hard to ignore 100 vertical pixels of menu bars. And clacky keyboards have been sidelined for a reason - it's generally much nicer to type on a soft keyboard, and in a crowded office your eardrums will thank you if everyone's using laptop-style keyboards. Of course, if you really prefer the old style, it's not hard to get a hold of one, they're just not as mass-produced now because the demand isn't there. Nothing to lament, really.
The Amiga had a RAM drive that was always the size of whatever was in it and no bigger. If you copied items to the ram drive, the drive size expanded (until you ran out of RAM), when you deleted items, the RAM drive size decreased.
I used to run a BBS and I would initially load all the executables to the RAM disk, with the message boards saving to floppies. As long as I was only warm-booting the machine (i.e., without turning off the power), the RAM disk would stay intact, and I could boot from RAM, which made everything run lighting fast.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The author of this article should try Vim - I believe you can split the screen all you want. Speaking of editors, I feel nostalgic about Speedscript, the word processor on the C64. But I sure don't miss editing in 40 columns!
I dislike the lack of configurability of some things today, yet for those things that are configurable they're still using an Advanced options paradigm from over a decade ago so things are hard to find (Windows is actually improving in that respect). I love how far Linux has come over the years.
In the 80's and early 90's on many home computers (like c64 and Amiga) movement of graphics was nearly always perfectly synchronized to the screen frame rate. As this usually was a TV-set or composite monitor running non-interlaced video the rate was 50 or 60 Hz. Today synchronization is pretty scarce to say the least!
And on every device. It was great having a simple, inexpensive, hackable interface into every device, controllable from any computer.
Yup. I have a cheap iOne Scorpius M10 at the office ($60 IIRC), and a Unicomp SpaceSaver M ($80?) at home. (I also spent the extra $5 or so to get keys labeled "Command" and "Option" to replace the Windows and Alt keys, at home.) They're pretty widely available and so, so worth it. A coworker just picked one up to replace the awful flat mushy keyboard that shipped with her HP TouchSmart 600. There's tons of information on the web about currently produced mechanical keyboards (google for "Cherry MX" switches), and they're not preposterously expensive (about what you'd spend for a nice pen or a reasonably nice low-end (e.g., an Invicta with an automatic Miyota movement) watch), and for something you use, a lot, (almost?) every day... http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%22cherry+mx%22&x=0&y=0 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=mechanical+keyboard&x=0&y=0 ...
geek. lawyer.
One feature I miss is a true low level format of a HDD. Now just for overwriting sectors, but for allowing the drive to rebuild its sector relocation table.
Older SCSI drives would mark blocks as bad and relocate the data. When they got low level formatted, the bad blocks would remain bad, but the area reserved for bad blocks would be clear (since the remapped blocks would be flagged as bad and not used.) This would allow the drive to continue to be used, as when the remapped block area fills up, the drive can't do anything except report soft/hard errors.
A true low level format also brought peace of mind -- any data on the disk before that was blanked out, and every usable sector has been tested to make sure it was readable/writable.
We sacrificed creativity, and some unknown possibility for the security fit for dumb majority.
I remember how my Amiga600 had TV Out as standard. The TV was the only monitor you could easily use for that machine if I recall correctly.
Went to PC, a decade or so went by, and suddenly graphics cards start flaunting this incredible new innovation that would let you use your TV as a computer monitor. I was less than impressed.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
On every single device, mobile and PC, actual power buttons are disappearing. My cellphone has a mutant mute/power, but the power only actually brings up a "What would you like to do, mute, airplane, or actually power off?" So, on a crash, take off case, pull battery. Things just aren't designed to turn off anymore. I miss that.
I8-D
Or "back in the day" when Firefox had a URL bar... just sayin'
Not only are clicky keyboards gone, but the keyboards themselves are going away with the advent of tablets.
I miss the instant boot of Apple ][ and the immediate access/modification to
any memory location as well as the possibility to write interactively assembly
programs with the built-in "monitor". It was a great machine to learn in detail
how a computer works .
"Yes, you have to reach an entire 18 to 24 inches"
when I said that to my wife she was impressed
Your wife must have an enormous cooter. Most women would be TERRIFIED of 18 to 24 inches, because the average cooter is 8 inches deep.
TFA is about (old) people complaining about THEIR PERSONNAL prefered (10 years ago) feature being abandonned for lack of actual or widespread usage.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Losing this is a *bad* thing? It might make sense on a single purpose device where you know what all the code running is doing, but on a modern computer running hundreds of tasks concurrently? Seems to me it would let you write lots of other globally available stuff too. I doubt you'd want most of it.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Das, Filco, Ducky.. hell even Razer and Steelseries make mechanical keyboards with tactile feedback and "clicky-ness" if you desire. Currently typing this on a brown switched Filco Majestouch 2, enjoying every second of it too!
If you can find them, buy one of those under-monitor "command center" style surge suppresses with switches for each power outlet.
Having read TFA (shut up!), the impression I took away was that the various interviewees were old fogeys who are either unaware of current functionality, or unwilling to adapt.
One of the complaints is that modern Linux/BSD should automagically pipe console output through "more", even when not specified... really ? Are these guys so lazy ? What of all the full-screen interfaces, and streams of scrolling text we want to monitor but not necessarily read page-by-page ? The same PDP-8 dinosaur-lover self-describes as being "good at making sense of unfamiliar technologies or processes". Riiiiight...
Another classy fellow says he can't live without the archaic IBM XEdit, which was basically a memory-limited dos Edit for mainframes, and he sorely misses Ctrl-C and "kill -9" on the Windows side (*ahem* Ctrl-C still works, and TaskKill). I mean, is this really what constitutes commercial journalism today ? Baby boomers longing for the good old days ?
You know what ? I also have fond memories of Turbo Pascal in the early 90s, just like I have fond memories of my first girlfriend. That doesn't change the fact that she was a mindless domineering psycho bitch that was quickly and EASILY replaced with an improved version.
If they want to post a relevant article, maybe they could whine about how old gear was built to last, while today's asian-made crap barely survives the trip from the store. My first-run C64 has survived a hundred times more drops, jolts and whacks than today's gadgets could ever handle.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
...most times, you simply hold the button a bit longer, say 5 seconds, and it switches off. Unless it has crashed of course, but then again : you wouldn't see the screen either.
"Yes, you have to reach an entire 18 to 24 inches"
when I said that to my wife she was impressed
Don't be so proud of yourself. It is her stock answer. She said the same to me.
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
Macintoshes have the same functionality.
The old PSU off switch is mostly gone now because killing power that way was hell on hard disks.
Atari ST, a dedicated Help button, and being able to control the mouse with Alt-Cursor buttons.
It took me ages to get used to working without that on windows.
"As a developer, I found it very useful for when I ran scripts that produced a surprisingly large amount of output or a lot of error messages," says Franklin. "I did not need to run the command over again in order to see it all. This feature has never been in another version of UNIX or Linux since."
Assuming a non-X11 console, but on most Linux (Ubuntu and CentOS) installs I've used, "Scroll Lock" and "Shift+PgUp" or "Shift+PgDn" lets you scroll back a couple hundred lines. FreeBSD uses "Scroll Lock" with the arrow keys. Doesn't give you an automagic "|more", but it works.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I still have nightmares of my three year old brother running into my bedroom while I was programming my dad's old TRS-80 and pushing the reset button because he thought it was funny.
If I need to bring a machine down hard, I can always yank the power cord, but for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE don't resurrect the stupid, fricking reset button!
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
That and the "turbo" button. Anyone miss that?
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
The almost instant boot is something I've missed. The fact that the OS was in ROM made some types of attacks impossible. I never networked it though. I don't know what kind of mischief they were doing on Compuserve.
-mechanical keyboards
-customizable keyboard shortcuts
-tweakable scrollbar behavior
-different placement of the destroy-window button
For god's sake, even GNOME can do the software stuff, and mechanical keyboards are alive and well.
What a whiner. All those things were around in the 80s, and all those things are still around. Most are a lot cheaper than they were in the 80s (spending a few grand on a PC was considered the minimum). But most of them have not made it into the bargain low cost PCs that dominate the market now for less than grand total.
You can still have the control key in the middle (where caps-lock usually sits), it is just a question of software configuration. You can still get clickedy-clack keyboards, and for less money than in the days of old. Most people prefer soft touch keyboards, because they do not have the same tendency to cause RSI, but keyboards have always been and will always be a matter of taste.
Height adjustable screens are still around, but they cost 5 bucks more. That being said, there is just no comparison even between the best CRTs in the 80s and even a cheap modern TFT screen. Geometry distortion, convergence issues, masks - all gone and replaced by perfectly spaced, much higher resolving, and mostly flicker free sub-pixel.
All the advanced GUI features are still available today, but most of them have always been and will always be difficult to implement on Windows. Windows caters for the masses, not for the IT expert. But you can have as many views of the same document open in Word as you like - you just need to use separate windows. (Excel is a different matter, and it could have evolved more than it actually has in some ways.)
And the flat memory model of the C64 (which actually was not flat, it was banked and quite complicated!) is still available. It is called kernel mode. But you are not man enough to use it... Remember that real programmer just need a hex keyboard and a system monitor.
That being said, there have been some real setbacks. TFT monitors have a delay now, and colour rendition was universally better on a colour CRT than a TFT. Programs seem to take longer to respond than they need to. Modal pop-ups seem to be on the rise, especially on Windows and MS programs. OLE never reached its potential, and the implementation seems to get worse and worse with new programs. And still on the whole, productivity of IT systems is up, and continuing to increase.
What did she say when you told her that to really turn you on she'd have to reach around back?
Actually, it pretty much is, although I think I was mistaken in thinking it was controlled by the BIOS. It should always do a hard shut-down, even if there's no RAM to load the BIOS into so it can run.
The feature is built-in to the power supply, so it'll always work assuming the power supply gets the signal from the power button. (It's wired to the motherboard, and the motherboard is supposed to supply it to the power supply.)
Just because most people are too cheap to buy a quality keyboard but instead buy a under $90.00 piece of crap is not my problem. Quit being a baby and buy a decent keyboard. the only place where you can buy expensive garbage keyboards is apple. Their keyboard is great except for the mental-fart making them flat chick-lets. Thanks Jobs for the crappy keyboard!
AS for the windows UI problems, I don't have that issue as ALL those lamented features still exist under Linux. I can put that evil close window button away from the others easily. Just because Microsoft and Apple refuses to let you have control over your desktop is also not my problem. You choose to use windows or OSX over and OS that allows customization.
SO what exactly is he claiming is missing? because from my vantage point I have everything he claims is missing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I miss the control-O (I think) command the DEC shells used to have, to flush all your queued terminal output, if you accidentally forgot to pipe your thousands of lines of output to "less" or something, so it didn't scroll for the next two minutes.
On Windows PCs at least, the BIOS will perform a hard power-off if you hold down the "soft" off button for 5 seconds.
Even "off", my desktops consume 2-4 watts. (Figure, $1/watt/year @ $0.115/kwh.) Thus, they're plugged into an outlet strip with a "hard" switch. 2 outlet strips, actually, one for stuff backed up by the UPS, and one for the bits and pieces (second monitor, speakers, printer) that don't need UPS. A third (that never gets turned off) strip connected to the UPS for the always-on stuff like router, ATA, and telephones. It saves a couple of bucks a month (and gives somewhat better protection against possible thunderstorm spikes).
Evolution just happens, so it can't be for the better. How should it? It would need someone to give a direction and to guide or control the process towards this goal. Which is not evolution.
...yank the power cord...
Only if you hate your hard drive, motherboard, and power supply... More than once, after doing that, the machine would not come back on. The switch could be placed under a cover of sorts, or booby trapped to keep your brother away from it. Either way, it is an essential part of the machine.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I wouldn't mind installing a turbo button on the office clock.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Sure, lots of software still has them. But Microsoft/Google/Mozilla are trying really hard to make us forget that menu bars ever existed, by replacing them with those stupid "ribbons" or with minimalist interfaces. Sure, with menus you have to sometimes hunt to find the thing you want. But with the ribbons, you still have to hunt...AND you have to try to figure out what all those little icons mean!
Seriously, this is a really ignorant article. Almost all the complaints are bullshit.
PC-Write, the old DOS text processor I used to write my freelance articles with, and also PEN, a Unix screen-oriented text editor that was at BBN when I worked there, which I used for writing computer documentation and other projects -- could split the screen window as many times as I wanted (e.g., I could have five or six slices of a file showing). For editing long, complex documents, this was a great convenience. By contrast, Microsoft Word can only split the screen in two.
VI anyone?
I really miss the 'clicky' IBM Model M keyboards from the mid and late '80s, for instance.
This is mass hysteria. For every fanboy that raves about their model M, there are 20 people that can't stand 5 minutes typing on these things. I tried it. Your significant other can't sleep at night, and your fingers get tired. They are old outdated pieces of shit.
This keyboard isn't cheap, Hedtke concedes: "They were nearly $200 when CVT was making them directly, and the current Avant Stellar keyboard is around $325. But for many of us, it's more than worth it."
You are a fucking moron if you pay $325 for this $20 dollar contraption. Don't believe the hype. The thing has a PS/2 connector for fuck sake!
CONTROL-C and CONTROL-Q "which could kill an accidentally triggered program, along with the Unix Control-C and kill -9 for command line Unix. I'm not sure if anything exists that can do that as quickly at the GUI level.
ctrl-c and kill -9 STILL work in *nix. You can even kill GUI apps using the command line, duh. Adding a GUI doesn't prevent you from using a terminal.
"One, moving 'Destroy Window' -- usually indicated by a square icon with an 'X' in it -- from the opposite end of the title bar where I'd only click on it when I MEANT it, to right next to 'Iconify' and 'Maximize.'" This window control problem is now universal, according to Cattey: "It's on Windows, Linux and MacOS, as well as Solaris."
What??? It is NOT universal. It depends on what window decorator you use. There is no "standard" for linux. Every distribution is different, and it's always configurable.
Before there were scrollbars, command-line interfaces to Unix and DOS would paginate output and pause when the screen was full, until you requested the next screenful with the "more" command
"more" is still there, but remember, "less" is "more".
"As a developer, I found it very useful for when I ran scripts that produced a surprisingly large amount of output or a lot of error messages," says Franklin. "I did not need to run the command [more] over again in order to see it all. This feature has never been in another version of UNIX or Linux since."
Umm, this actually sounds annoying as hell. There is a reason more and less are separate commands. If you REALLY wanted to have an automatic "more" command, you could write a shell wrapper. But in the end, some programs require a TTY, and having this automatic "more" functionality will break them.
"XEDIT had the ability to restrict the file to a part, and have all editing commands, such as 'go to top/search and replace/select to bottom,' only work on that part of the file."
Once again, VI. While not exactly the same, you can do analogous functionality in VI. And much more.
"It could overlay hardware, firmware and regular memory as needed, and had no reserved memory sections. This let me write macros that were globally available."
This is the dumbest comment of all. Can you imagine if modern computers were implemented this way? You'd be rebooting 10 times a day.
When he switched to PCs, he used DOS's TSR (Terminate and Stay-Resident) feature. "Now, I'm
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
What I'm missing most are people using computers and looking forward to new ones, tossing away the dusty old stuff of yesterday and actually being curious what the future brings instead of looking back in nostalgia.
But are we really going backwards?
I mean, reading that list made me think of some old geezers complaining about how cars in their time had a big ol' crank in front, unlike these wussy cars that kids use these days.
I mean, complex and hard to master scrollbars? Really? That's a thing to miss? Exactly what usability advantage does that have? Exactly how many new users are complaining that scrolling up and down isn't complex enough?
Besides, what's described as totally awesome functionality lost, isn't lost at all. You can still get an outline view in Word or OpenOffice Write or whatever. Even programming IDEs have that. So exactly how the fuck is that a lost feature? The only thing "lost" is that it's no longer done by learning arcane ways to use a scrollbar.
I mean, even the person missing them in TFA starts by basically saying that it was a pain in the butt to learn to use them. So exactly what's lost there, by doing the same thing in an easier way? The whole argument boils down to "it's bad because it's not the exact clicks I learned to use waaay back". Or in other words, "stop the world, I don't want to learn anything new ever again."
Other arguments get fucking stupid.
E.g., on page 3, "Steve Silberberg, software contractor and owner of Fatpacking" misses having a program called "see", which was... a hex editor. I mean, really? He's a software contractor and he doesn't know how to get a hex editor on the Internet? That is a lost feature for him?
Just to make it clear, I'm pretty damned sure that hex editors still exist, since I even made mods for Fallout 3 with a hex editor and made a tutorial for how to do that, waay back in the days before there was an official toolkit and before even NifSkope got updated to open the new mesh files. Finding one didn't even register as something hard, much less as a feature lost forever.
Really, what the hell is that guy even doing as a contractor, if he can't even find a hex editor? Seriously.
Another guy on the same page is bemoaning the loss of some obscure old text-mode editor, misses TurboPascal (Delphi apparently isn't the same for him), and has been programming in NotePad until he found a port of his old favourite text-mode editor. Even the feature he mentions as missing in newer editors is actually trivial to simulate in any IDE (if nothing else, you can just copy and paste that part into another window and work there)... not to mention that if you need to specifically mark from where to where you want to edit in a source file so you don't get into other parts, you probably should have made that part a separate file in the first place. And not to mention that by using NotePad he's actually having even less features anyway.
I'm sorry, but that's not loss of features to "devolution", that's just the kind of guy who illustrates the kind of attitude that fuels the rampant age-ism in the industry. The only "devolution" there is that he doesn't want to learn anything newer than the good old days of his using XEdit.
Other personal whines mis-represented as features lost to "devolution" include:
- doing the same things with different key combinations nowadays (sorry, key combinations never went away. Just the ones that guy used changed)
- having the control key in a different position than in some guy's youth (so what? It's not like he didn't have decades already to learn the new position)
- how in the good old days you could set some obscure variable to read program output in pages at a time (unlike, I guess, these days using "less" to read program output one page at a time, and being also able to search and go forward and back)
Etc.
Sorry, I actually went there to learn about some awesome features that we've been missing, but I don't see any. I'm just treated to a gallery of people who somehow never learned how to use new keystrokes or a new program to do the same things. Which is actually even more freaking sad than "lost features."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ah..., the good ol' days, when there really was a "big red switch" with which to perform the standard "BRS reset". Get off my lawn...
Seriously?
There's a replacement for all these rants by non-computer professionals. Control/caps remap apps exist in every platform, alt-f4/apple-q hello!, resize your terminal window or suck it up with less, etc etc.
One of the merits of Windows is it has kept numerous keyboard shortcuts from even the Brief days, ie control/shift-insert.
Article was just too computer unsavvy, failed to note many old and obscure features died rightly through UI unification, and just lacked technical depth to merit credibility.
Many early operating systems could keep several versions of a file. This was in UNIVAC EXEC-8 (now OS-2200 and still in use) in 1967. Creating a new empty file and then writing it did not make the file visible to other processes until the file was closed and committed. The new file then became the latest version, the old file became the previous version, and if a retention limit was specified and had been reached, the oldest version was deleted. UNIX/Linux/DOS/Windows pathname-based systems don't do that, and so atomic file replacement tends to be difficult, non-portable, and often not done.
MULTICS had better security than anything currently mainstream. The hardware supported protection rings and the OS used them usefully. Things we think of today as "middleware" and "DLLs" ran in inner security rings, not high enough to penetrate the core OS but protected from tampering by applications. Hardware support for calls to a inner ring made this fast. Most OSs today still don't do "big objects" well, things which are used by multiple processes and have state of their own, like databases and printer queues. "Big objects" tend to either have too many privileges or too few.
There's a mind-set today that a language can be either fast or safe, but not both. This is a legacy of some bad design decisions in C that were carried forward into C++. We used to have variants of Pascal suitable for systems programming. Most original Macintosh software was written in Pascal. Modula, by the time of Modula III, was powerful enough to write a whole OS. But it died when Compaq brought DEC and closed down research there.
Another casualty of the UNIX/Linux vanilla approach to hardware. The IBM System/38 had security features which allowed fine-grained security within programs. But it was too different from everything else to become mainstream.
I too miss the reset. On my C=128 it was a small button surrounded by a pinky-sized hole. Very convenient for frequent crashes.
QUOTE:
Jochen Heyland, a developer at Members Only Software, which provides enterprise software for non-profit organizations..... misses the Commodore 64's memory model. "It could overlay hardware, firmware and regular memory as needed, and had no reserved memory sections. This let me write macros that were globally available...... Now, I'm using Windows. There's nothing like this old feature there."
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I remember back in the 90s using the Watcom C++ debugger and loving the fact that you could step through the code execution in reverse.
Are there debuggers out there that can still do this?
If I need to bring a machine down hard... Funny how that qualifier you just happened to leave out changes what was said entirely...
How is the reset button gone? Maybe on mass-produced crap like what Dell will give you, but I have never bought a computer case that didn't have a reset button.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I think the volume control in laptops got worse as the analog wheel was replaced with Fn keys. Maybe they now want that things happen in the "digital domain". Still, it's not a good paradigm for that purpose - too inaccurate and a pain to use. (A proper headphone amplifier would be nice too. I believe that even the elite laptops have the basic weak output.)
I never see any of these spamvertisements that people are referring to, no matter what my karma or status is on this or that site.
Mostly that's because I use privoxy, which does 99% of the adblocking I ever want. However, I do on rare occasion play the "Block Content" or even "Edit Site Preferences" games in Opera. I think of "Block Content" as something of a first-person-shooter video game to shoot down intrusive spamverts.
I am so allergic to spamvertising of all sorts that I really can't read generic stuff on the web using somebody else's browser setup without going pretty completely batshit. I've been known to cover the stupid jumping pictures with giant postits or a taped on piece of paper. I am no more capable of reading static text while something is juggling screaming cats right in front of my face than I am capable of reading a book while a wailing banshee blasts out my eardrums from 2" away.
It's like how people with Tivo report that when they're visiting someone else's home and see a TV running with commercials on it, their first thought is something like "Huh! That TV's broken." That's exactly how I react when I come across someone else looking at the web with all its spammy in-your-face attention-seeking whinings: that their browser must be broken or something.
Disabling moving GIFs and sound by default is really mandatory, and really probably plugins, too, unless you have some other mechanism to block them. I've even been known to turn off javascript on specific sites just so the dumb things stop moving around on me. Even tooltip popup balloons can be maddening: just shut up, get out of my face and my mind, and let me read in peace, damn it! I would never read a book or magazine that had a loud screaming baby built right into it, and it simply astounds me that anyone puts up with this sort of outrageous assault.
I truly think that without the the serene freedom from the otherwise relentless spamvertising that this privoxy+opera combo gives me, I'd've long ago gone medieval and probably completely postal on these rude assholes. It's criminally abusive what they try to do to us.
Nobody has the right to strap you in a seat with your eyelids sewn open so they can steamshovel their spamverts into you. We call that assault, and nobody but nobody should put up with it. It's like the insulting "can't fast-forward through ads" property on some DVDs and some players. Their rights stop long before they reach my mind: I am not their prisoner, so go find some other sheep to bugger.
Back in the day, on certain machines (specifically Lisp Machines and their derivatives), you could boot up, start your programs, adjust everything to be just-so, and then save the machine state onto a special part of the hard drive called a band. Then, when you next needed to restart the system, you had the option of loading that previously saved state and continuing from there. It meant that mid-1980s machines were about as fast to boot to a customized fully usable state with applications loaded and initialized as my almost-two-decades-later desktop screamer with a solid-state drive.
Relatedly, I miss small appliances (various hand-held devices, along with audio and video equipment, microwave ovens, etc.) that turned on and were instantly ready to operate. Everything these days seems to have a microprocessor that takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to boot up, from cell phones, to mp3 players, DVD players, TVs, etc.
Yeah, when can we get instant-on working again?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Writer is a moron.
I'd like to beat him to death with an ibm keyboard.
Speaking of Address/URL bars... I hate that I can't re-arrange Windows Vista/7's address bar in Explorer and remove the favorites completely from IE8. Granted, I don't use Windows except for work where I need to have IE open for at least part of my day... but it's enough to bug the shit out of me.
In case you don't understand why I'd want to move the address bar (and remove the search box):
http://i.imgur.com/b2WD9.png
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Actually, the "complex" scrollbars seemed to have at least one useful feature--the ability to scroll by paragraphs. Making that easy, via scrollbar or key combination, might make reading easier for millions of people each day across the world. Or it might not. But it's worth doing some kind of study, at least--it struck me as a potentially useful feature, at least where the paragraph is not longer than the screen.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
While the power button on the front is a "soft power button" by design, any quality PSU will have a physical power switch on it. That is a hard power switch since it psychically disconnects incoming mains power.
The boot process used to go a lot faster. There are many background programs launched at start up now and they each take a while to get warmed up.
And shutdown used to mean flipping a switch. That was nice.
Please redesign your homepage so that the "Posted by" comes in front of the headline so that I know which articles to skip.
Also, if you could change "Posted by" to "Posted buy" for slashvertisements, that would be great.
> The [reset] switch could be placed under a cover of sorts, or booby trapped to keep your brother away from it. Either way, it is an essential part of the machine.
Isn't it great how families rarely have to worry about tort liability?
"So HOW did your brother turn into Don King?"
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The stuff we had in Acorn's RiscOS back in the 80's. The ability to hold down the right mouse button on any scroll bar to be able to pan around a window by moving the mouse. Being able to drop files onto different apps on the task bar to do different things, a feature that is starting to come into Ubuntu Unity. Not having this stupid Filer dialog that Linux copied from Windows, where you have to re-navigate your entire file system every time you want to save a file.
One thing I miss from my old 80's mobile... the ability to have it turn off at a certain hour and then turn on again automatically in the morning.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I miss the easy to find 1920x1600 screens. They were getting pretty common, but they suddenly dropped down to the lower "High definition" resolution of movies. Now they are almost impossible to find for under $1000.
I'm starting to miss the height of the screens we had a few years ago. We have reduced-height screens now, also known as wide screens because it's a better marketing pitch. If you want the same vertical space you have to buy a wider monitor or one which rotates (both might be ok for desktops) or a wider and bulkier notebook which contradicts the very concept of a portable computer, unless you're not a nostalgic of those old transportables of the '80s or you're the owner of one of these beasts :-)
PS: about keyboard mappings, among the other things Gnome let's me remap Caps Lock as Control and that's a Good Thing.
DEC operating systems (starting with PDP-11s and ending with the VMS Vaxen) used version numbers.
A file name consisted of a name, extension, and a number. This is still supported in the ISO filesystem generally used on CDs, incidentally.
If you just typed the name.ext, the shell supplied the highest version number available to whatever tool you invoked. So, edit file.dat would edit the most recently created copy of file.dat.
If you used a tool that created or modified files, and did not specify a version number, it would put a version number on the file one higher than the highest one already known, or "1" if no file with that name existed. Tools that copied files maintained version numbering painlessly.
This system increased programmer productivity incredibly, and also increased the quality of programmer output. It was truly a joy to have, speaking as a pro coder with 30 languages under my belt. If you never used it, I don't think you can possibly understand how great it was.
How many times have you made fifty edits to code, trying to solve a bug, and then suddenly realized that the bug was in a completely separate area of code? You get two choices - either back out all fifty edits by hand, or abandon those fifty edits as well as any other edits you've made since the last time you made a backup. Since a programmer can make thousands of edits in a work day, either choice is LAME compared to not having to make a choice at all!
In automatically version numbering systems like VMS, you say "oh crap, go back to version -50" and you keep all the good edits and discard the bad - completely painlessly, by typing 3 extra characters!
Auto versioning was awesome. If you used it for more than a month any sane person would want it forever. At the end of the day you said "purge -2" and kept the last two versions of everything, or, if you had lots of backup capability, you purged first thing every morning instead.
Unfortunately, economic models (FOSS is the best!), DEC's self-destruction, and the dislike of all things VMS by the BSD crowd and Linus Torvalds, has left truly excellent version control to the dustbin of history.
There are a hundred hacks and habits that people use every day in vain attempts to approximate the painless builtin version management of VMS. All of them involve *doing something other than coding* rather than just focusing on the code and having the OS act intelligently for you. They all suck! It's like going back to the days of specifying cylinders and tracks before being able to create a file - just let the OS do it instead, instead of insisting on doing pointless, error-prone busywork.
Most computers either have a physical power switch on the power supply, or are designed to switch to battery when the power cord is removed (perfectly normal, safe behaviour for a laptop, tablet, mobile phone, etc.)
A system should be able to survive a power outage of the sort caused by "yanking the power cord", turning off the power strip, etc. If you have components that can't survive that, you need a UPS, or a new computer.
Not a Windows PC, but a machine that features soft buttons and the right BIOS.
TFA is quite biased based on some weird facts. The clicky keyboard is very much alive, see Das Keyboard, Filco, Cherry and so on.
He clearly isn't aware of what software exists today, or even how people are using it. To his defense there is a clear tendency away from keyboard shortcuts, clicky keyboard etc. Mostly it's because rubber dome simply are cheap as hell and a decent mechanical keyboard easily costs $100+.
Apple, Microsoft and many other companies drive the development of mouse-centric user interfaces, but that's mostly because the broad appeal of the brands. If you use tools for development you will find they are still keyboard-centric.
As for quitting applications, every window manager/decorator does this. If you want feature X, find one that has feature X. Simple as that ;)
I do like the clicky keyboards though, my Das Keyboard is wonderfully comfortable to write on, but it does irritate some people. As for shortcuts: get over it. Where they are very useful such as in text editors etc, they are present. Even GMail has them, so TFA is just some premature ranting.
I wonder if he misses carpal tunnel too?
Actually that will work equally well on a "Linux PC". Indeed, you need not even have an operating system installed. PC and BIOS != operating system.
As you say, you can get clickey keyboards. Das Keyboard is an example. Most people just don't want them. Light press keyboards are not only quieter, but they are more ergonomic.
Along those lines, you want a keyboard with programmability or function keys on the left? Logitech. Most of their G series keyboards have that and range from $100-200 and are extremely high quality.
The scroll bar crap? Sounds like the "In my day shit was hard and we LIKED IT!" If they were "very complex scrollbars that took a while to master" they were not good because it shouldn't take a fucking post graduate education to use a computer. Also I can't see anything he's describing that matters for it in the slightest. Scrolling text is real easy on today's computers, particularly with scroll wheels.
And paging through? Spacebar dipshit. Firefox, Acrobat, will page when you press it. Also there are these little keys called "page up" and "page down". Wonder what THEY do?
The flat memory model is perhaps the stupidest of all. "Oh I miss when computers just let me write to whatever memory I wanted!" I don't, because they were easy as hell to bring down. If you are a programmer and you don't appreciate the reason and function of a protected memory model, I really don't want you writing software for me. Flat memory was a major problem, it was done because it is simple to implement, not because it is a good way of doing things.
The see thing is also hilarious. As you note, it is called a hex editor. More hilarious is that most text editors more powerful than notepad have one built in. If you open a binary file they just automatically go to hex mode. Even more hilarious is that there's better tools now for that kind of thing. Because of the greater structure to executables in modern OSes, you can get tools that can better view and edit the resources separate from the code.
Like you said, just old people whining. "Things are different than they used to be!" Yes, yes they are. Deal with it.
She's blonde, she just thought bigger is better. Should have saw her face when I brought home a yard stick...
You are a fucking moron if you pay $325 for this $20 dollar contraption. Don't believe the hype. The thing has a PS/2 connector for fuck sake!
I agree with your premise but the jab at the PS/2 connector is misplaced. You're going to want that if you want to use one of the typical legacy adapters to connect it to some other kind of system. PS/2 to USB is cheap enough, but USB to PS/2 is all but nonexistent.
If you REALLY wanted to have an automatic "more" command, you could write a shell wrapper. But in the end, some programs require a TTY, and having this automatic "more" functionality will break them.
this is actually something I've been expecting to see in a shell for a long time. I'm kind of amazed it isn't readily available. It does seem like you could write an easy wrapper to pipe everything to more, though; if output is less than screen size it won't have any visible effect.
I think the Slashdot editors are just trying to wind us up here...
Amen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I open a command/terminal window in OS X, pipe output to "less" (which is better than"more"), use vim, kill (-9 if necessary), grep (or egrep, and perl for more complicated conditional/structured searches and filtering), sed, control-C, etc. I use command-Q to quit a GUI program, command-H to hide it, command-W to close an active window, etc. I have a whole whack of tools sitting in the "Services" menu that can operate on selected text. I can cut-and-paste to and from my GUI programs and send that output into command-line programs (type "man pbpaste" and "pbcopy"). I can open a bunch of files from the command-line as if I had double-clicked them in the GUI by using the very useful "open" command.
If I'm running Windows, I don't suffer in the hell that is the MS-DOS command line, I have Cygwin installed, which is 10x better than what MS-DOS ever had. Linux has all the same command-line stuff and innumerable tools. I freely move my scripts between systems with only minor modifications (and pipe the output, a page at a time, to "less" on all of them). And I haven't even touched on Powershell, which I haven't used, but looks quite useful. If I really wanted the clicky old IBM PC-style keyboards to type on, they can be bought or often times found at used equipment stores.
This guy is in a bizarre world where he can have practically all the things he's pining for, but is apparently unaware of that fact. Systems haven't "devolved" (which is a meaningless term anyway), he's just passively accepted whatever has been plonked in front of him and apparently never cracked a manual or hunted for solutions to match his preferences. He's clueless. He's the one that is "devolving" or stagnating, while computer systems continue to grow and adapt, including hybrid systems that combine the best of GUI and command-line tools in ways that exceed what was previously available. The list of genuinely useful things that have been lost is a lot shorter than he suggests, and sure doesn't include address spaces with unprotected memory. It was simple, yes, but ye gods I wouldn't go back to that if you paid me to.
I miss the days when you could create a persistent RAM disk in MacOS that would survive between soft reboots. You could copy your whole OS to the RAM disk, reboot with the ram disk as the startup drive and boot in seconds. It still puts modern SSD's to shame.
There was very little in his list that is gone in unix/linux. Yes, you can do alot of stuff via gui now, but most is still available from CLI. Even his key re-assignments can be done in X. Granted the key will still say caps lock, but it will do a ctrl if you remap it. I think the only thing I ever "lost" was the old rand (sometimes called ned) text editor. So I wrote a replacement so I would have it on linux. It was not that difficult to write. I think with the improvement in tools, compilers, machine speed etc, its not that hard to re-invent the old stuff fairly quickly.
No. Only point was for programs that did timing based on cpu clock, so you'd need to slow down the PC to use them. I remember several games that would run too fast if the turbo button was pressed.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
This article was disappointing drivel. Examples:
I'm not sure what the writer is whining about. I still have keyboard shortcuts.
Termination of process? It's easily available. Oh, you don't have UNIX or a MacOS? Too bad. Get it.
Scroll bars and page control are easily mastered from the keyboard. Oh, you're not on a MacOS. Right.
All his words sound like the whining of a mosquito. No substance. Moving along.
White keyboards (I live within driving distance of a Fry's and a Microcenter. Neither had a single nongimmicky white keyboard (except one that was for a mac).
Non-widescreen computer monitors. (A lot of people still have them from when they made them, but just try to find one in a store.)
A reset switch does exactly that, a cold start, without turning off the power, and stressing out the machine.. That's why I want it... the 'qualifier' I left out (intentionally) is irrelevant...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
De-evolution doesn't have a meaning in the context of biology. But in common usage, it does mean change for the better. If I say he is a more evolved person, or this system has evolved since then, the context of more evolved being "better" than less evolved is clear. Besides, if de-evolution has no meaning, why did people understand what was meant?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Back in the day I wrote a TSR for DOS called "cAPSlOCK". If you hit a shifted letter key, you got a capitol letter and the CapsLock key -- if it was on -- would be turned off. No more aCCIDENTAL sWITCHED cAPITOLIZATION. At least, until Windows came along. I can count on one hand's fingers how many times I've intentionally gotten a lower-case letter by using shift with the CapsLock on. Dinosaurs like me who learned to type on mechanical devices learned to use Shift to unlock CapsLock, so this behavior seems natural to me. Fortunately, we'll die off soon enough.
Oh, man. I can think of so many things that have either been lost already or are on the brink of being lost. For starters, web sites that don't require a supercomputer just to display. :P
I also enjoy an old "clicky" keyboard that is slowly falling apart after much use. It is an odd one that has the function keys on the left, which works better for me since I am left handed. Bought it for next to nothing back in the early 90s at Microcenter - Insanely rare to find on eBay and even then anything similar would go for hundreds of dollars. (Is there anywhere else these can be found?) I wish I could go back in time and pick up some more. I also miss the days when it was unthinkable that a standard PC keyboard would have the Microsoft Windows logo on it!
Oh, other things that are harder to find - monitors that can do oddball resolutions (nothing like running MAME games at native resolutions on a CRT), LCD monitors that don't stretch lower resolutions out distorting the image, or that aren't useless "wide" screen in the first place. Motherboards with full legacy support: Dual COM ports, Parallel, PS/2 - and even if you can find one that has an FDD header it seems most these days only support ONE floppy drive (I have uses for this stuff, deal with it). Worse yet, finding newer motherboard with any significant number of PCI/PCIe slots seems to becoming more rare. The way I do things I could easily fill up all 7 standard expansion slots on an ATX system.
I also miss the days when computers didn't absolutely have to constantly be connected to teh innernets, didn't phone home, and "they" didn't keep logs of every action for all eternity.
And of course the days when computers were simple enough one person could understand the entire thing, and there weren't usually pieces that actively tried to keep people from doing whatever they wanted with the system or data.
I'm sure there are enough comments about people's lawns here...
It's not entirely dead, but Instant Messaging. SMS texting is simply inferior technology. We're stuck with a system that only accepts 160 characters at a time, doesn't work over WiFi, costs extra per month, and doesn't give any indication whether the person has read the message or not, or even has their phone on. Instant Messaging was free, supported an unlimited amount of characters, was much faster since everyone's using real keyboards, and gave indications whether the person was busy, typing, away, etc.
If you REALLY wanted to have an automatic "more" command, you could write a shell wrapper. But in the end, some programs require a TTY, and having this automatic "more" functionality will break them.
this is actually something I've been expecting to see in a shell for a long time. I'm kind of amazed it isn't readily available. It does seem like you could write an easy wrapper to pipe everything to more, though; if output is less than screen size it won't have any visible effect.
I am not much of a fan of "more", I use "less" for most tasks like those, vi-like navigation, search/etc, and it's lightweight.
Anyhow, a similar functionality can be achieved by running screen, and using its scrollbuffer to watch long outputs.
Of course, any good terminal emulator should be good for this also, like gnome-terminal or putty.exe
Killing the power puts a lot of stress on the components. A reset switch avoids that issue. I would expect people to understand that. Not a lot of hardware folks around here, is there?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The correct troll wouldn't have been taking the browns to the super bowl, it would have been while you were receiving a blumpkin. Please try again.
the click keyboard was a horrible invention, it's loud, it's big and it's just not a good buy anymore. Why do I need to hear my self type or annoy my roommates!
We lose out on single page documents. What's wrong with these sites? Why do I need a flipping slideshow when an article would do fine?
Ad impressions. I know. I take one look at this trash and leave. I'm not even going to bother with looking for a "print view" to circumvent it.
Do everyone a favor. If you get to a site like this, leave immediately, this adding +1 to their bounce rate.
Still can buy a brand new one from pckeyboard.com - made on original IBM equipment these guys bought.
It's not that the mechanical power switch was that good an idea. It's that the "soft" off/on switch mismanaged by dysfunctional OSes was such a remarkably bad idea. Fortunately, the "what could possibly go wrong?" crowd has failed to find a way to prevent people from shutting down their software locked computer by yanking the power cord out of the wall.
I think the Slashdot editors are just trying to wind us up here...
You're right! Let's not give them the satisf...oh, nevermind.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
How about a laptop mouse without stupid poorly implemented multitouch? I can't tell you how many times my fancy multitouch laptop mouse mistakes a single tap for a tap with two fingers. I also hate that the button area also acts as a mouse, so my clicks tend to migrate from their intended position. Oh the joys of living in the future! And to top it all off, Linux doesn't detect it as a touchpad so it is not disabled while typing. It's like having a haunted machine!
It was amazing what you could tell from the pattern of lights, and they were aesthetically pleasing as well...
Turbo Button :-(
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
File revisions
Dropbox, subversion, time machine, snapshots - it is just that we have more solutions now than back in the days, and you have to pick one.
If you're on Windows, you probably have Volume Shadow Copies (OS snapshots) which can be enabled.
Or use an OS that doesn't lock up.
Name one...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I don't think I'll ever understand why people consider noisiness in a keyboard to be a feature. I consider it to be a bug. It's distracting when people around you are trying to concentrate. It's annoying and inconsiderate. I shouldn't have to wear earplugs around you just to get my work done.
I'll gladly turn in my geek card if it means I can get some peace and quiet while I work. Have fun with your nostalgia on your own time; please don't force me to partake of it, too.
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
Where I live, the electric utility's reliability is... less than perfect. If your hardware can't withstand the stress, you either don't have the right hardware, or you need a UPS. Nobody suggested killing the power as a good way to shut down a system; only as a last resort measure.
On the other hand, if your laptop or other mobile device can't withstand having the power cord removed, it is broken.
-1 Redundant is more like, since somebody else already posted the exact same thing as the 2nd comment on the page (and it's only scored at +2. mods are on crack today.).
1. open a terminal
2. start zsh
3. echo "asdfasdfasdfasdfasf" > slashdot-demofile
4. slashdot-demofile
you're welcome
I've never needed it on my Macbook or my Linux machines, so I'm going to say "OS X" and "Linux."
Along the same lines, I really miss the TURBO button.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Fast-forward to around 2000, and the potentiometer was replaced with 3 buttons on the side, volume up, down, and mute. These buttons where sluggish in responding, especially if the computer was busy. I kept forgetting which was the mute when I was panicked by an obnoxious site at work. Trying all 3 wasn't useful since it took a couple of seconds to see if they worked, and looking for the low-contrast mute icon embossed in the plastic required lifting the laptop so I could see it in the light. More than once, my panicked solution was to hold down the power button for several seconds to force power-down. But those several seconds could be embarrassing. There was one point where I planned to add a physical switch to the actual speaker wires, although I never got around to that.
Now, of course, even the volume side buttons are gone. The mute function key does work and responds quickly, but there's still that slight extra delay finding it - it's not something I use so often that it comes naturally. Usually, I just leave the computer always in mute unless there is something specific I want to listen to.
You're not trying hard enough... I've locked them both up plenty of times. And I'm not just talking about the applications.. Complete lockup.. frozen solid...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
You might like this KDE feature request, it asks for exactly this feature in KDE:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169043
Please comment there to get the bug reopened. Thanks!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I miss the way the Amiga handled its display and managed "custom screens" (and later "public screens" too). Amiga screens represented a middle ground between forcing apps to live only in windows or giving one app total control of the monitor (as games typically do today).
You could have multiple apps running full-screen (each with its own resolution and color depth!) and switch between them in an easy-and-standardized way, and even slide a screen downward to partially reveal the one behind. I understand the next Mac OS will have increased support for full-screen apps, but it seems like even Apple have been slowly, timidly groping their way towards what the Amiga had since 1985.
And while I'm at it. . . . It irks me that Mac OS apps sometimes grab the input focus away from the app I'm using, sometimes even when I'm in the middle of typing. Amiga OS never ever did that, and it drives me bonkers when it happens. Hey Apple, when are you gonna finally figure out this newfangled "multi-tasking" OS?
A real, mechanical 'off' switch, on the front of the machine
For it to be a real, mechanical 'off' switch it needs to be on the right hand side of the machine, almost at the back. It also needs to be red.
I do miss when the Mac OS had ResEdit. ResEdit did what its name suggested -- it let you edit and create resource forks of files, which is where pre-10 Mac OS kept all the "meta", non-data information in a file. You could configure & customize pretty much any bit of the OS using the program. That seems antithetical in the Jobsian world of Apple closed systems. When I was a kid, I got MultiFinder to run on a 1MB Mac Plus by using ResEdit to hack out bits of things from the system files to reduce the RAM footprint.
On a somewhat related note, have you noticed that iTunes has gotten, well...big? Like over 200MB of active RAM big? For an mp3 player. Ridiculous. Well, open up the package contents, and you'll find a whole mess of language files. Delete the languages you don't need and you'll save yourself about a 100MB of RAM. For some reason iTunes keeps every language pack in active RAM.
Even though the main article has a lot of drivel about the old days, there are things we have lost.
As an EMACS user, I really do hate it that other editors and readers (e.g. adobe reader) don't let me view multiple sections of a document at one time. Lately, Adobe Reader on linux seems to have adopted a "feature" that if I open up a second copy of a document, it instead just brings the window of the first copy to the front, so I can't even use that to work around the lack of multiple views of a single file. (I think I found a way around that problem, I just can't remember what it was.)
It used to be in unix you would run one process for one task. Now it has become popular to run one process to manage many GUI windows; instead of an Xterm process per window, we have one gnome terminal process handling all terminal windows. When that process dies, you lose all your terminal windows. The same thing applies to browsers: Why do I lose all my windows when the browser crashes instead of just one? Because they couldn't implement proper file locking to allow multiple proceses to access the .mozilla directory?
And the NFS / NIS multiple workstations with a single home directory used to just work, and was expected to work. fvwm was fine. But now Gnome has decided it doesn't have to handle multiple versions of Gnome (from workstations with different software installed) accessing ~/.gnome*. It even is screwy if you are only logged in one place at a time but switch between workstations of the same version of Gnome but radically different screen resolutions. If I log in on a lab machine, firefox won't start because my default profile is still in use back at my desk!
Not so long ago, Gnome went on a "simplify everything" spree, removing features left and right. Among other things, I dearly miss edge flipping, where you move the mouse cursor past the edge of the screen to change desktops. So much so that I go through the hoops of installing a non-standard window manager to get around it. Even though I don't know who Dean Johnson is and can't remember where I got the quote from, I found he agreed with me, and I've had a quote from him in my rotation of random email .sigs ever since:
"The ONLY thing that I really miss is mouse edge flipping and I will punch Havoc the next time I see him for that." -- Dean Johnson
In the Windows-ish type stuff, you see an X, a box, and a line.
I see an X, a box, and a 360 degree circle. But then I look to the top right and see the line, box, X that you're talking about.
The line has always bewildered me
It represents the shape of a taskbar entry in all versions of Windows Explorer from Windows 95 through Windows Vista. Roughly it means "turn this window into a taskbar entry". (Windows 7 changed taskbar entries to be square.)
> File revisions
Dropbox, subversion, time machine, snapshots - it is just that we have more solutions now than back in the days, and you have to pick one.
Not the same thing. Version control systems are manual. They only kick in when you deliberately access the version control system.
File versions are automatic. You get a new version every time you save a file, not the next time you commit, not at the next backup but now. And it applies system wide, not just to those key structures that have in a version control repository.
There are some down sides:
Directories get a bit noisy with all the revisions around. It also eats disk space, although that isn't nearly the issue that it used to be.
Having at least 1200px vertically as standard and 1536px for less than $500. Nowdays you often have to pay over $1000 to get more than 1200px.
To me it seems widescreen simply meant, to most manufacturers, removing rows of pixels.
Rotatable monitors are nice, but 1080px horizontally is also quite annoying.
You agree with me.
What a bunch of whiners. "The program I used 20 years ago went away! "
Pfft! How about getting a real friggin' parallel and serial port on a modern laptop. Embedded computers still like to talk to the world over a 9600baud connection, and the parallel port still makes an awesome cheap multi-sensor port.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
This is mass hysteria. For every fanboy that raves about their model M, there are 20 people that can't stand 5 minutes typing on these things. I tried it. Your significant other can't sleep at night, and your fingers get tired. They are old outdated pieces of shit.
I agree with everything but this. On the best rubber dome keyboard I've ever used, there's still an unclear transition between "off" and "on". Not so on a buckling-spring keyboard. Once I used one for a week or so, I'd noticed that my typing speed had improved by 20 WPM. I didn't need to spend so long ensuring that I'd hit the key I wanted to, because I could feel whether I had or not. Consequently, I could move faster because proper strikes could be confirmed by feel. And since it provides a bit more resistance, my error rate went way down since it's harder to fat-finger.
And I spent $70 for mine, a lot but not unreasonable considering that I'm generally typing 12+ hours a day. By the heft of the thing, I'll have that keyboard for 20 years. And it came with a USB connector, not PS/2. It is loud, I'll grant you - but it's worth it to me.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
You've been lucky, then. Linux is my OS of choice, and I also own and use a Mac. While both OS' are, IMHO, much better than that other one from Redmond, I have managed to lock them up from time to time. Not often, mind you, but it CAN happen.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
A flat memory model has nothing directly to do with memory protection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_memory_model
"Memory management and logical-to-physical address translation can still be implemented on top of a flat memory model in order to facilitate the operating system's functionality, resource protection, multitasking or to increase the memory capacity beyond the limits imposed by the processor's physical address space, but the key feature of a flat memory model is that the entire memory space is linear, sequential and contiguous from address zero to MaxBytes-1."
Compared with the (user hostile) x86 segmented model, it's not so stupid after all.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
I don't think I'll ever understand why people consider noisiness in a keyboard to be a feature. I consider it to be a bug. It's distracting when people around you are trying to concentrate. It's annoying and inconsiderate. I shouldn't have to wear earplugs around you just to get my work done.
I'll gladly turn in my geek card if it means I can get some peace and quiet while I work. Have fun with your nostalgia on your own time; please don't force me to partake of it, too.
Click keyboards were the result of manufacturers exploiting a misunderstanding of their customers. Mechanical keyboards with good travel tended to be noisy relative to spongy membrane keyboards. Discerning but confused customers would seek out keyboards with a noticeable click. Manufacturers responded by making keyboards that clicked louder than necessary. Often the feel wasn't even very good. They keyboard was just noisy.
A good mechanical keyboard isn't necessarily loud at all. My all time favorite was the Apple IIe keyboard. Light, smooth travel, and virtually noiseless. The travel was also shorter distance than the IBM keyboards which made typing quicker but it still had that effortless movement down to solid bottom that typifies the best mechanical keyboards.
On Windows PCs at least, the BIOS will perform a hard power-off if you hold down the "soft" off button for 5 seconds.
And yet, when I actually have to hold that button for 5 seconds, I feel like it's actually 5 eternities.
while i like USB, i would appreciate a form factor which includes screws, like the sub-d connectors.
Complete, logical, easy to navigate, identical over all system applications. In comparison, man really sucks, and let's not even talk about Windows.
Every computer I make has one.
However they really aren't needed by any except you, and 4 other people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
" was hell on hard disks."
thats toped being true when the added the ability for the disks to automatically park.
I think that would be 1991.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just for the record, that IS funny.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Modern equipment should not have any problem with yanking the cord.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I miss Shareware that you didn't have to register. Either it wasn't time limited, or if it was, you could just delete it and reinstall.
Being able to read the readme before installing the program.
The concept of 'screens' that you could drag down, with different colors and resolutions.
file extensions with more than 3 letters
Sensible version numbers ( 6.4 is higher than 6.12 so it should be the newer version
memory, and storage sizes expressed in powers of 2 not 10. A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a megabyte is 1048576 bytes and a gigabyte is 1073741824 bytes
A CTRL key next to the caps lock key, and a little LED on the caps lock key so you can see its on (not way over to the far right of the kybd.
screensaver thats off by default (whats the point of a screensaver these days, LCD screens don't have burn-in problems like the old b/w CRT's )
I can hit Alt (or Ctrl) F1-F12 with my eyes closed, no problem. Alt (or Ctrl) + F1-F5 (up to F7 on Alt) I can do with a single hand, very little interruption.
Try being a gamer some time, where such things are practiced with remarkable regularity. The only time I EVER need to look at my keyboard is when I accidentally DROP the damn thing, as my room arrangement leaves the keyboard pretty much permanently in my lap.
I have both. Every motherboard I've purchased has has reset switch pins, and every case (so far) has had the actual switches to hook them to. The power switch is real and it definitely works ... my 2-year old proved that to me this morning as I was working...
Reading through the article, I got the sense that it's just a bunch of old school power users who can't roll with the new hotness. Honestly, who uses the word "Destroy" when talking about closing a window?
Me: Go ahead and close that window there.
Old man: Huh? What, you feeling a draft or something?
Me: *blank stare*
Old man: While you're makin' a boom boom in your diaper there, sonny, I'm going to go ahead and destroy this window.
Me: That sounds violent.
I see your power buttons, and I raise you printer buttons and lights. Why the fuck the printer has to communicate a empty tray, paper jam or empty toner with a "blink code"?? Press button once to clear the buffers, hold it three seconds to clean the heads, hold it 10 seconds to turn off, sheesh ...
Word 5.1 for Mac had a ton of awesome features that never found their way back, once Word 6.0 came along to make it as awful as the Windows version.
It had the ability to do "formulas", which was essentially a markup/layout feature allowing mathematical formulae of arbitrary complexity, like TeX or MathML. It was truly amazing. I used it in contract deliverables to explain how adding more data entry folks wasn't going to help my customer's queuing-related slowness.
Configuring your own menus! It had a "Commands command" that allowed you to assign any command to any menu (and optionally assign keyboard shortcuts at the same time). I used it to add "Open... " to the Window menu. Even though it was already available in the File menu, if I had closed a file, I would go to the Window menu expecting to see a file there, and it wouldn't be there. So having "Open..." available there allowed me to reopen it immediately. (That was before there was such a thing as an "Open Recent" menu item. Nowadays I would add "Open Recent" there too.)
You could also export your Commands command settings to a configuration file, upgrade your version of Word and then reimport your Commands command configuration file for the new version of Word.
The list goes on and on, but I've forgotten most of the lost features. I remember that there were more, but I've repressed what they were. It's as if a good friend had died, and you had to move on. It just hurts to remember how great things used to be.
The catastrophic loss of features in the 5.1 to 6.0 downgrade was the beginning of the Mac community's unabashed hatred of Microsoft. Until that happened, Mac users who had Word and Excel considered themselves an elite within the elite (the best software on the best OS). But once Microsoft perpetrated 6.0 upon us, the Mac community started to hate their arrogant guts. How DARE they call it an upgrade! How DARE they act like they were doing us a favor by making it the same as Windows!
It would be hard to imagine a company more thoroughly trashing all of a market's goodwill than that one event (Word 6.0 for Mac).
has your soft power button ever failed to turn off your computer??
Making things easier, particularly via GUIs, all kinds of formerly useful features of text shells, text languages, etc. have been tossed out. The GUI experts won the battle, and the didn't consult those who came before.
How about graphical shells... where's the pipe function? Redirection? Something so useful, simple, and fundamental... and missing from every GUI.
How about wordprocessors. Back in 1979, using Scribe and Emacs, I could put together a complex document in ways I haven't seen recently. For one, with few changes lines, I could change the format of citations, footnotes, index, etc.... maybe going from IEEE standard to ACS standard in 20 seconds. That's because the word processor understood such things at a high level, and could format these in your format of choice.
Compound documents, too.. I could wire a paper, then include it as a chapter in a book, without having to renumber or change much of anything.. and keep it as a separate file, for both evolving documents. I've seen WYSIWYG tools that supported this (Mentor's "Doc" comes to mind), but this fails completely in popular WPs like MS Word.
-Dave Haynie
We've lost the basic ability to store and process email. Back when we all used terminals connected to one big computer (Unix, etc.), it was clear where your mail lived: in specific files. You could access it from anywhere (via modem), and you could process it with tools (grep, sed, etc.), use "tar" to back it up, encrypt it with PGP, or basically do whatever you wanted with it, effortlessly. It was YOURS.
Nowadays, half your email lives on a remote IMAP server: accessible from anywhere, but inaccessible to your local tools, and if your mail provider ever gets shut down, you could lose it all. The other half lives in local mailboxes on your desktop or laptop, accessible only when you're physically next to the machine. Or worse, if you use two desktops (one at work, the other at home), you might have local mailboxes on each, making it impossible to do a full search of your email. Some people work around this by carrying a thumbdrive and putting all local mail folders on it... but then you have to back up the thumbdrive, etc.
This is why I download all email from my ISP to a Linux machine at home (via fetchmail), access it via OpenSSH, and read it in emacs, or run a local IMAP server. This provides all the benefits of the old "terminals" model. The downside is you have to be a computer wizard to set it up.
Turbo Button.
People joke about the Newton's user interface and handwriting recognition, but if you programmed them, they had features that modern handhelds (including iPhone) still don't have.
They had this "routing" infrastructure that had something in common with NeXTstep/MacOS X "services". Basically you defined "stuff" you could do for specific datatypes. Like you could set up "routing" that let you register things like "if you can convert what you have to text, then I can fax it for you" with the system. Then the little "envelope" icon in the corners of documents would dynamically update with whatever operations were available for whatever datatypes. It's a bit like the iPhone's "Open in..." system, but richer, especially since you could do the equivalent of Unix pipelines ("hm, you've got a vector image, and that can be converted to GIF, and I know how to fax a GIF, so, let's show the user a fax option").
Data was also stored as objects in databases (instead of in a filesystem), and there was a way for software to add attributes to the objects of other software without creating namespace collisions. So pieces of software could add arbitrary rich attributes to the built-in contact list app or calendar app, and it all worked, and the data was preserved, and nothing broke.
The alarm system... the device ran on a bytecode interpreter, a precursor of sorts to today's JVM or CLR. But it was simpler. And when you registered an "alarm" with the system, you could not only make it pop up a message, and you could not only attach the equivalent of a URL (both of which you can do today on iOS)... you could embed a lambda in it that would get executed when the alarm fired. So, like, you had a combination of "cron" and "at" in there, accessed the same way as simple alarms.
Sigh, I should stop right now before I get depressed.
I can't help but think in kind with most of the replies heretofore, thus:
File revisions = Time Machine (specifically, the Finder integration in which you can select a date and view the folder as it was)
Rings of protection = Necessary Evil (stubborn hardware OEM's [cough cd/dvd roms {teh brackets. oh, speaking of growing pains, upper and lower filters anyone}])?
Safe, fast languages = Anecdotal? There are fast, safe languages. I'm no expert, but I hear that perl is often a trump card used when referencing fast and safe (or is that due to simplicity/scripting nature? Anyways...)
Capability machines = Sandboxing (most recently Adobe)? /tinkerer
I , for one, sure wish we still had the great voice recognition support the old HAL series had.
Who is John Cabal?
I'm going to miss mice once we all have to poke our screens with our sweaty fingers thanks to these shitty ass tablets being so popular.
That's what the Firefox extension, Platypus is for... unfortunately, it's no longer maintained, but Aardvark can produce similarly readable web pages without out too much work. Combine that with the Greasemonkey script, Autopagerize to join those multi-page articles designed to make you look at a whole new set of advertisements for each paragraph, and you come a little closer to having the experience that Tim Berners-Lee had in mind for the world wide web in the first place.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
I remember when web articles were presented as a single continuous page, rather than being split up into multiple segments to generate more ad impressions.
Well, that is true for WinWord.exe, but not for Word.exe (i.e. Microsoft Word for DOS) that supports up to 8 window splits at once. As much as I loved Bob Wallace's program, once I tried Word.exe (version 2), I never went back (or switched to anything else in the next 20 years).
I come here for the love
For those of us who spend a lot of time in the shell, screen is quite handy. The MIT AI Lab's ITS system from the 70's had this functionality built in to its equivalent of the TTY driver. You could detach your session from the current terminal, leave it alone in a "headless" sort of state, then reconnect at a later time. You didn't need to plan ahead and make sure that your jobs were started in a screen session, it just always worked. Screen is basically an effort to emulate this functionality in userland for POSIXy systems.
In Protected Mode (32-bit) segmentation is an option, but I am not aware of OSes using it. Apps still can, if they want (VMWare did, don't know if they still do) and they OS has to save the registers to task switch, but you can use a flat model.
However in Long Mode (64-bit) segmentation has been retired. You can still do some segment like trickery with FS and GS if you want, but memory is flat in Long Mode and there isn't an option to change that.
So they are complaining about something that is, again, outdated. It is silly to bitch about segmentation being a problem that you have when the current processors don't have that problem (unless you decide to run them in Real Mode for some reason).
However all that aside, RTFA he said "It could overlay hardware, firmware and regular memory as needed, and had no reserved memory sections. This let me write macros that were globally available." What he's really talking about is the ability to write to any memory on the system as he wants. No, you can't do that in Windows, Linux, or any modern OS since it is a security and stability risk.
Alternate Title: Butthurt Neckbeards Demand Bad UI
I miss my turbo button:-(
Of course they do, considering it is part of the ATX specification.
In the 1990s dpi was going up, refresh rates were going up, there was actually a reason to upgrade. Now we're all stuck with the "HD" fad, probably forever. If you want a bright, high dpi screen it's limited to 5 inches or smaller. TVs get advertised as "120Hz" or "600Hz" or some marketing bullshit where the input is only capable of 60 and they just strobe the pixels 10 times per frame. Desktop screens are being sold, in the 21st century, incapable of actually displaying 24-bit colour. Dithering on a TN panel is very visible and it looks like shit.
No it doesn't. It triggers a processor hardware reset. It does not cause your hard disks to reboot their onboard controllers, it doesn't cause your CD drive to do a power on reset, doesn't clear your RAM, doesn't reset the other hardware devices. The processor then restarts, rereads the bios and starts the power on init cycle, which will result in almost the same thing as a power on, but a hardware reset is not the same as power on to pretty much anything in the PC.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It added a line in the Explorer drop down menu. When selected, you would get a small command line with the filename in it.
If it's an executable, you can add arguments without opening a prompt. If it's a regular file, you can prepend the filename with something you want to open it with, like Notepad or a hex editor.
I've used it from Windows 95 to Windows XP, but it doesn't seem to work under Windows 7. As a work around, I can simulate it by holding down shift, right clicking the file, selecting "Copy as path", and pasting that into Start-Run, but that's a lot clunkier.
I still need to register...
My computer has a reset switch. Depends on which model you buy. Or just build your own.
The mechanical off switches were horrible. They were a common source of failure for computers. Not too surprising, given how much current (voltage?) was supposed to run though them when they got flipped. They were heavy as heck for a reason.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Hard drives auto park, no damage there, hasn't been an issue for 20 years.
Unless you're using a shitty power supply, its fully capable of handling all these things just fine and powering off the motherboard in a safe manner ... you know, just like when you push the power button ... by shutting down the supply voltage to the board and letting the filter capacitors bleed out ...
You know what the old power switch does? It cuts the circuit on incoming power ... which is EXACTLY like 'yanking the power cord'.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I use a USB keyboard myself, but I know a lot of gamers especially prefer PS/2 connectors - if they're wired properly (the "keyboard matrix" I think it's called) then you can press any number of keys simultaneously and the OS will register them all. Since it works on polling rather than interrupts, a USB keyboard can only get up to 6 at a time (depending on which key combination you're trying to access, it can be as few as 2 at a time) unless it buffers the keystrokes, which would add latency to your Quake/Doom/StarCraft commands.
Because the wiring matrix for making a perfectly usable USB keyboard (i.e. not limited by the wiring, only by the inherent limitations in the technology) is much simpler than an "N-key rollover" matrix, cheap PS/2 keyboards don't have N-key rollover either. Expensive ones generally do, and tout it as a feature.
Sniff. I miss those days.
And the Good old Turbo Pascal license. "Treat this software like a book..."
And to make a beep was just "play(N,S)" where N was the freq and s was the time in secs.
At most the set up was "require sound" or something simple like that.
:-) yeah, we crude primitive savage neanderthals still haven't figured out how to use a computer without turning it on first.. In fact we don't even have self starting machines.. gotta hand crank em to fire em up, and man! it's a real knuckle buster when they backfire... And the fact we like to perform experiments on them only makes the situation worse.. damn lucky to keep them running for a week before something pops... lots of steam and hissing noises and the occasional connecting rod stuck in the ceiling.. the kids sure get a kick out of it though..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
.. but that realtime ITWorld update scrolling to the right of whatever I was looking at just sucked eggs.
I miss static pages.
One need look no further than the KDE and GNOME projects to see de-evolution in action.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Other things I miss: TUIs like Project Oberon and Symbolics Lisp. Hell, Lisp in general is now such a niche it's sad. "Real" Unix - lots of little programs that do one thing and do them well. cat -n considered harmful and all that.
For a text interface influenced by Oberon, see the successors to Unix by the original crew: Plan 9 (Plan9port brings it to Mac/Linux), Inferno (a VM environment), and even Acme SAC (Inferno edited down to Acme). I use Acme SAC every day as my tiled text-based window manager/shell/editor, for both its minimized (fewer options, cleaned up) versions of a key set of unixy tools (the ones not harmful:), and a wrapper to run the host OS' command line tools. (I can intersperse its unixy commands with Cygwin and Windows commands in the same script, for example).
Here's my server-side clone of the Acme SAC repository: Just hg clone, and run Acme.exe. http://code.google.com/r/jasoncatena-acmesac/
The original Facebook had this incredible classmate finder feature. I could input all the courses I was taking, and it would tell me who else was in them. Definitely one of the most useful features Facebook has ever had. Once they added 3rd-party app support, they dropped the classmate finder feature, explaining that they expected someone else to create a better one (the logic doesn't make sense to me, but whatever). Of course, with multiple non-ubiquitous classmate finders competing, no one could ever find more than a couple of their classmates, so they were all useless.
Why, why, can someone for the love of god tell me WHY is the space bar still a bar? I have two thumbs, split the damned thing in half so that I don't have to listen to "tap tap tap KA-THUNK tap tap tap tap KA-THUNK tap tap KA-THUNK" all day.
It's a six inch wide key, what the hell people?
Alleycat FTW
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
That and the "turbo" button. Anyone miss that?
I've got a DDR1 era mobo with the usual 2 IDE controllers and 2 SATA ports.* The SATA ports are enabled/disabled with a jumper on 2 of 3 pins on a 3 pin header. Plug the Turbo button onto it, and I can run one OS on SATA drives, or turn them off from the front of the case, and use mobile drive racks to put in IDE drives for other purposes, like TiVo hacking.
*Interestingly enough, the SATA ports hang the boot process with 1TB drives attached, but I can put adapters on them and hook them to the IDE bus, and the board handles them no problem. Even handles 2TB drives.
Can't afford to test with 3TB drives. : - )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
somehow be set up so that I could program on them for three days straight. Back when I was on my trusty Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, why I could sit in front of my 13" inch TV screen for hours on end, stopping only to nap on the carpet for the 2 to the 3 hours it took to successfully save my work to cassette.
But with this new fangled Macbook Pro... man, after just five or six hours my *back* starts to hurt. And even these new 24" LCD screens that are supposed to be such a big improvement? Well I don't know what it is, but they sure don't seem as sharp and focused as my old VDT did. I can barely make out the text unless I wear these special "reading" glasses. How is that progress?
Is that a picture of what you don't want or what you do want?
'Cause it looks about like how I'd laboriously re-arrange IE 5 back when, and about how I layout FF 3.whatever today.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Do want... and it's not really laborious. Anything to customize the interface. I despise how locked down Windows has become.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I miss Turbo Debugger for the 80286, where you could use memory breakpoints and they "just worked" and nedit (I think it was the Norton Editor) -- where you could search and replace special characters. Thank goodness we have FAR and mc to replace nc.
Every end has half a stick.
what a load of baw
Seriously, Multitasking. The Amiga could run two graphical demos at the same time in different windows, while formatting a disc. In 1985.
In 2011 you insert an Optical disc and the entire system locks up for several seconds, and just try playing two video files at once. This is with 1000x the processing power.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
You do realize when you hover over the dots, you see icons
I believe that's called mystery meat navigation.
The reset switch/button!
My current desktop computer (a dual core, so not something from last century) still has it. My laptop doesn't, however.
But then, I don't really need it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
After over a decade of widespread use of web forums, we've only gotten "ignore user".
My strength has not been restored . hidden in the shadow of his old head like a red nose Lengheng soon . grabbed Rope hanging from the cliff edge Supra TK Society Sale, and finally strenuous climb . two people not breath , thundered from the top of the head of a large spar falling, while the front of the supra shoes
Picked up as early as agile supra coma
, While the spar dodge the falling pieces have one side and ran quickly Paolu . this kid is not quite a bad eye Supra Skytop II Sale, I fear anger, supra killed immediately
. Duolu bolted in front of someone watching , pick eyebrows . faint smile , did not answer , looking at the supra shoes
Rapid disappearance of the figure, the face of the shadow of the complex look like flash . forest plan -completion of large-scale scientific research base collapsed Supra Indy NS Sale, so that all of the escape route is really awkward . continuously to find a few slightly larger Chuansong Zhen, were all Destroyed by man-made . Since a large area of potholes view , supra shoes
I miss ECC RAM on desktop machines.
At the cost of useful features like wake on lan, and the extra effort of flipping several switches to bring your machine up, you will save a few hundred dollars over the course of your life. Good show.
And anyhow, a better answer to that complaint would be to point out that you can still buy the things, brand new. Unicomp still makes them.
Making fun of dumb people since 2009