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."

Comments

Out of touch old people ranting.

[CharlyFoxtrot]

"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.