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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."
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?
de-evolution may not have a meaning, but devolution has a meaning: gradually becoming an early 80s band that wore red conical pyramid hats and liked to whip it, whip it good
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"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.
proper on/off switches on PSU's not the stupid rocker switches (or even worse no switch at all)
I can understand not liking a complete lack of a switch, but what are you looking for in a power supply if not a simple rocker switch? What, do you want an oversized knife switch with electricity arcing all around it so you can shout "IT'S ALIVE! ALIVE!!! AAAAH HA HA HA!" whenever you need to flip it? Because... well, okay, I want that, too, come to think of it...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
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
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!
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.
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 just tried this, but now all I can see is the side of my monitor. Not Recommended.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!