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Celebrating '21 Things We Miss About Old Computers' (denofgeek.com)
"Today, we look back at the classic era of home computing that existed alongside the dreariness of business computing and the heart-pounding noise and colour of the arcades," writes the site Den of Geek. An anonymous reader reports:
The article remembers the days of dial-up modems, obscure computer magazines, and the forgotten phenomenon of computer clubs. ("There was a time when if you wanted to ask a question about something computer related, or see something in action, you'd have to venture outside and into another building to go and see it.") Gamers grappled with old school controllers, games distributed on cassette tapes, low-resolution graphics and the "playground piracy" of warez boards -- when they weren't playing the original side-scrolling platformers like Mario Bros and Donkey Kong at video arcades.
In a world where people published fanzines on 16-bit computers, shared demo programs, and even played text adventures, primitive hardware may have inspired future coders, since "Old computers typically presented you with a command prompt as soon as you switched them on, meaning that they were practically begging to be programmed on." Home computers "mesmerised us, educated us, and in many cases, bankrupted us," the article remembers -- until they were replaced by more powerful hardware. "You move on, but you never fully get over your first love," it concludes -- while also adding that "what came next was pretty amazing."
Does this bring back any memories for anybody -- or provoke any wistful nostalgic for a bygone era? Either way, I really liked the way that the article ended. "The most exciting chapter of all, my geeky friends? The future!"
In a world where people published fanzines on 16-bit computers, shared demo programs, and even played text adventures, primitive hardware may have inspired future coders, since "Old computers typically presented you with a command prompt as soon as you switched them on, meaning that they were practically begging to be programmed on." Home computers "mesmerised us, educated us, and in many cases, bankrupted us," the article remembers -- until they were replaced by more powerful hardware. "You move on, but you never fully get over your first love," it concludes -- while also adding that "what came next was pretty amazing."
Does this bring back any memories for anybody -- or provoke any wistful nostalgic for a bygone era? Either way, I really liked the way that the article ended. "The most exciting chapter of all, my geeky friends? The future!"
Any old 8 or 16-bit software from decades past, if we have any of that software around today, it still works. And all we'd need to run it was the appropriate hardware.
Software you buy today, might not work in 6 months. It almost certainly, like 99.99% certain, won't work in decades. And if it even works today as you buy it, it only works when it can connect to some authorizing server. So we have no idea, literally no idea what is required for current software to run. You have the software, the hardware, an internet connection, and some mysterious something out there on the other end of the wire.
So what do I miss? I miss software that works.
No sonofabitch was trying to monetize my data, watch what I do on my computer or online (when there was an online to speak of), or force-feed me advertisement.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
'nuff said.
I miss BASIC. Seriously. I miss the days when the built-in command prompt was so easily accessible and so easily programmed that a 6 year old child could learn how to write "Hello World" within a few seconds, and could begin exploring the computer on his own after that. (That's exactly how I started, by the way.)
When only nerds were online and cared about computers. The general population ruined it for us.
I'm not going to say I miss "guru meditations," but whenever I interacted with the machine it would stop whatever it was doing and respond to me. I miss that.
On my Apple ][+ there were no loading progress bars for games on 5.25" floppies but you could usually tell where you were in the loading sequence by the pattern of grunting that the hard drive was making.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Since we have the ability, I've tried several times to go back and relive the nostalgia of some of my best remembered old home computer games. It turns out that by modern standards most were frustrating with bad controls and limited gameplay, and yes there were bugs. However, the simplicity and purity of some of the game concepts is what made them so enjoyable (Jet Pac, Boulderdash, Chaos etc). My preferred approach these days is to play 8 bit themed modern indie games from VVVVVV through to Terraria and Stardew Valley, the better ones have that same gameplay purity, get a nostalgia kick, and benefit from vastly improved controls, and expanded gameplay and possibilities. The best of both worlds. And yes, I realise some of these are getting older now too.
Old computers typically presented you with a command prompt as soon as you switched them on
Oh you lids.That's not true at all. Old computers, both commercial and hobby, looked at you stupidly and waited for you to toggle in a bootstrap loaded on the switches and lights before they would even consider giving you a prompt.
Eventually some hobby computers did gain a prompt through built in ROM. I remember the SWTP 6800 computer that would give you an * prompt if you got everything right. If you got the baud rate wrong, the "*" became a "fu".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Given things like Windows 10, tablets and phones that have 90 percent of their use in apps on the Internet, web-based everything, constant updates that break more than they fix that you can no longer refuse, restrictive EULAs that do nothing but cripple you, and firmware designed to always let the company in and lock you out...
You don't own the hardware you paid for anymore, and the companies are working hard to make sure it stays that way by crippling alternatives. I miss this already, but everyone will probably miss it in the future when it's done and impractical to change it. Worst thing is that I don't think most people will care until then.
Didn't need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our Apple ][ ran great.
Those were the days.
Back in the day, ....
MY data was SAFE on MY computer.
I miss off-line Privacy.
I ran a BBS for a MUG (Macintosh Users Group) for 19 years. It was called Electric Sheep and it ran SoftArc's FirstClass software. Had that badboy up to 10 dial-in lines at one point and a 256k Internet connection! (I was glad to shut down the UUCP mail gateway...)
(FirstClass was really groupware software, but it made a great BBS.)
It was a great community of people, many of whom knew each other in meatspace. It would have been just a diversion if it weren't for the people who made up the community, helped each other, produced a magazine together, met frequently, and generally were real friends.
It's been years since we had to shut it down - membership had dropped off and it was hard to justify the time to maintain when it dropped to fewer than 75 regular users. (at its height, we had 600+ users, most of whom paid $1.50/month to help pay for the lines.)
A far cry from an impersonal, corporate-owned and defined online experience.
These days, I know a few people like myself that are invested in 3d printing. It can be great to go out to see other people and compare notes on what they are doing with their printers.
I started with a Dick Smith Systems-80 (A TRS-80 M1 Clone), and I still own one (as well as a bunch of others)
It was probably the peak time for interesting hardware, hundreds of different hardware designs, processors, I/O, DOSs, etc etc etc.
Variations of Basic (And even FORTH on the Jupiter Ace), the advent of colour and sound, joysticks, light guns.
The Magazines were useful, they had construction articles, software articles, how-to articles, the adverts were even useful for information.
It was like evolution on steroids, new and interesting designs were thrown out there to see what worked and what didn't
Todays computing landscape in comparison is pretty bland in its sameness and Magazines articles are really just advertorials.
Discussions back then were useful and people did not care what you used, it was new , it was interesting , now they degenerate into flame bait Mac/Windows/Linux sucks rants.
So much good was lost.
Honestly, the ability to turn the computer off with a real on/off switch, is what I miss most. I'm so sick of holding the faux-power button for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 seconds and still never being sure if the god damned thing is off.
Only LUDDITES like using LUDDITE software on LUDDITE computers! Modern app appers only app the appiest app apps on Appdows 10 Cloud!
Apps!
I miss going to the arcade (or bowling alley) with a group of people. It wasn't just about playing the games but the social aspect of it. Lining up quarters on the SF2 cabinet as to who "had next". Now I see kids staying home, each on their own xbox/Playstation and connected via VOIP with their friends.
Even LAN parties were better than what we have now from a social interaction standpoint.
(quoting from the article)
1. Loading games off tape
Why we miss it: Ah, soothing...
2. Low res graphics
Why we miss it: Left a few things to imagination, and it was drenched with character.
3. High scores and extra lives
Why we miss it: Simpler times.
4. Playground rivalry
Why we miss it: Friendly combat. Happy days.
5. Computer clubs
Why we miss it: The camaraderie and the refuge from the slings and arrows of the ordinary world.
6. The sounds
Why we miss it: Always something new to amaze our ears.
7. Learning to program
Why we miss it: A rewarding activity that taught us a lot.
8. Attribute clash
Why we miss it: Because it’s a cute little limitation.
9. Playground piracy
Why we miss it: Don't miss this one so much.
10. The demo scene
Why we miss it: It amused and sometimes amazed us.
11. Memory limitations
Why we miss it: It fostered creativity and was something to be overcome.
12. Buying the wrong computer
Why we miss it: All part of the game.
13. The 16 bit era
Why we miss it: The first really big upgrade of the classic era.
14. Early 3D
Why we miss it: Our first look into a virtual world.
15. Text adventures
Why we miss it: An adventure into another world, and a workout for our typing skills.
16. The mags
Why we miss it: They plugged us into the world of computers while entertaining and informing us.
17. Getting a modem
Why we miss it: Our first taste of being connected to the world.
18. Buying upgrades
Why we miss it: It was a game played in real life, with your real money.
19. Old controllers
Why we miss it: They were weird and wacky, and generally, simple.
20. Platformers
Why we miss it: Escapism into a surrealistic world and jumping around, like an Amstrad owner at the school disco. What’s not to like?
21. The end of the era
Why we miss it: A bittersweet farewell that led to other things.
More specifically manuals not intended for drooling imbeciles. I'm talking computer manuals that described the hardware in detail. Long before I finished high-school I taught myself about computer architecture, assembly programming, even hardware hacking using mostly the manuals that came with my first (Microbee 32k) and subsequent computers. Those things were encyclopedic! Long descriptions of the system, why they chose design x, possible gotchas, a sprinkling of the history/evolution of the system, detailed information about ports and memory maps, circuit diagrams, even things like suggested mods to add battery backups, more memory, switchable ROM banks etc and hints for repairers. As a teenager I devoured that stuff!
The glossy, inaccurate combo token screenshots and poorly-translated dot-points in today's manuals just makes me miss the old manuals more.
Beige. Seriously, I missed the beige PC boxes. Especially the InWin beige boxes.
I really miss typing faster than the computer could cope with. I really miss waiting ages for a program to load. I also miss the tape loading programs and listening to all the I pitch noises and then hoping it did not crash when it says please switch over to side two. I really miss dialling those BBS boards with Zmodem to download a little program that took so long they could have sent it by post faster. I miss people asking me "is it broken" and me replying no it takes a little while to start up. I really miss Amstrad BASIC, Amiga BASIC, PC BASIC,
10 print "hello world"
20 goto 10
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
I miss sitting in a cold room with a PC "Homebase" because they get too hot in a warm room.
And I really miss looking at a green screen.
And then later the floppy disks I think MS-DOS come with 7 floppy disks for the "state of the art" Olivetti computer.
Like anything, it was a lot more fun when computers and the internet were new and exciting. Now, it's all so routine that it's almost boring. My current systems aren't anything special, but they're heads & tails above the first "real" computer I had - a 386DX16 (?). And my first internet account was just a Unix shell. But that first computer and (dial-up) shell account were more exciting that what I've got now.
The Commodore 64 had 64K and a BASIC ROM and a 1 Mhz CPU. You flipped the power switch and BAM, it was ready to use. Now, we have 4.1GHz CPUs, M.2 SSDs and the boot is anything by instantaneous. Ain't no one got time to wait for Windows 10 to install patches and reboot. Let's go go go!
Fast Hackem
TL;DR: "Remember back in the day when everything was terrible? Boy that was great."
Actual things to miss:
- When games had no detectable load times and you could go from turning on the console to navigating the menus to actually playing the game in a couple seconds.
- When the idea that you owned your hardware and everything installed on it wasn't a sad fantasy.
- When computers and software were self-contained and didn't collapse into a pile of uselessness without an internet connection.
- When there weren't 20 layers of abstraction and emulation between you and your hardware and you were free to take direct low-level control of (and completely ruin, half the time) your entire system.
Early 80's, Scott Adam's Adventures for the TRS-80. A co-workers wife was as addicted to these as I was. We not only traded tips on how to solve a puzzle, we made sure we bought different games and traded them as we bought em.
Also miss "debugging" games. I don't know how many hours I "wasted" stepping through Z-80 assembly to find out where a game stored "something that took a while to generate". Learned a lot of Z-80 assembly that way, as well as how to use a debugger. This was a good year before engineering found out I could program and made a lowly electronics tech a software engineer writing 8086 assembler.
I don't miss any of those terrible things.
Well, okay, I don't miss them, since I actually bought a mechanical keyboard. But nowadays most people don't have them. Back in the day, when you got a PC, you'd get a good, solid, and wonderfully noisy keyboard. Of course, PCs used to cost a fortune, so you'd expect that. Nowadays they're quite cheap, so it's not viable for manufacturers to toss in anything but a $5 rubber dome. But folks, trust me on this: a good mechanical keyboard is worth every dime.
Also, trackballs. Once you get the hang of it, you won't go back to a mouse.
WTF? [Obligatory text I am forced to enter even though I've made my point in the subject]
Wire wrapped, Z80 processor board. Motorola 6845 (using the design of the IBM Monochrome Adapter from the original PC) board. Single 8" drive running CP/M (I think I bought an S100 drive controller board but I can't remember where it came from - the disk drive came from IBM, where I was working at the time as a student). Surplus S100 rack ordered from "Radio Electronics". The power supply was hand made by one of my roommates that wanted to design his own switcher (it actually worked quite well). Keyboard was a surplus Ti-99 keyboard I bought at Active Surplus in Toronto. Monitor was an old portable TV I drove composite video into directly after removing the tuner.
Good days.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I miss bashing the Mac kids before anyone started calling you homophobic.
I had the "Mapping the C64" book. Said every address on the computer. Now, good luck knowing 5% of what's happening on your box.
Also, cassettes sucked. Slow, and head alignment issues meant you weren't always able to share tapes.
Privacy, complications, buggy, bad usability and experiences, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Being able to understand the computer top to bottom, that's what I miss about that era.
Yes, it was frustrating to try and make it stable and configure it. But the HW, and the OS and the SW were so simple that, if you were so inclined, you could deeply understand the whole stack...
Nowadays, not anymore...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
A $10,000 home computer? What's that, a goddamn Apple Lisa? Most home computers of old were far cheaper than that.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I use to be able to write config.sys & autoexec.bat files on the fly...just to get a little more low DOS memory for games that had to have over 600k. Rewriting modem AT commands on the fly, for certain BBS's. Screwing with IRQ's to knock down problems, and who can forget messing with soundblaster configurations.
Forgot all about FirstClass. Did that require a GUI client, or did you use Zterm/Red Ryder?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
How much fun it was to blast a new Anti-Commodore demo on the Atari 800XL (Atari's were on one side of the room where the monthly computer club meetings were) all the way to the other side (where the Commodore owners were sitting).
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
When you bought a game and you didn't have to wait ten minutes for it to install, then another twenty for it to download, basically, an entirely new copy of the game called an "update" before you could "play" it.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Yes that's right, a goddamned Lisa, named after the bastard daughter of a giant asshole who died of ass cancer.
Not completely computer related but I remember when I first started working full time at IBM and was in a product status meeting for the 3180 terminal (http://oldcomputer.info/terminal/ibm3180/index.htm) and how excited everybody was about the orders coming in for it.
The reason? It had a completely flat top which secretaries could put plants on. No other terminal top had a flat surface with no cooling holes like that monitor.
I guess this would be considered sexist now.
Looking at my Acer flat screen monitor with my little "Deadpool" character two-sided taped to the top, I can certainly see the attraction of a completely flat monitor top.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I miss the hard physical write-protect tabs we had on floppy disks.
Nowadays, if you plug in a USB stick or external hard disk, you have to trust that the OS won't write or screw up your data in any way. Ignoring bugs and and "helpful" OS's who try to reformat if they don't recognize the filesystem, with viruses and other malware, you can't trust software to enforce read-only modes.
1. Instant on. Turn on the switch ad the computer's booted. On some machines, you might have to wait for your DOS to load, but it was typically quick. No more waiting minutes (or sometimes hours in the case of Windows XP) to boot up.
2. As noted upthread, BASIC. Yeah, it was a crappy programming language. The microcomputer versions were pretty bad--line numbers, single letter variables, no structured programming constructs, lack of hexadecimal notation for POKEs, and slow speed. Debugging was nearly impossible as the language was prone to spaghetti code and it was hardly self documenting (who is going to waste precious memory on a REM statement?). Regardless, it was very straightforward to use and allowed novices to create something that worked. It forced people to learn how to code, as even the most basic of commands, like "LOAD "*",8,1 was a BASIC statement. If you wanted to do anything with the machine, you had to do something in BASIC. It was good for people to learn.
3. Games. The games were fun and didn't require investing a part of your soul and all of your spare time to play them. I still play some of them in emulation when I have some time to kill. they were unique, and there is nothing like them today.
4. Modems. Yeah, they were slow, but you had to love that handshake/connect sound!! It's amazing how much juice they managed to get out of them near the end. There is something very primal about connecting a computer via phone line. I miss it. I read recently that modems don't really work on VOIP lines, which is what most remaining land lines consist of. That's a big bummer...
5. The Atari Joystick Standard. I have a very hard time playing with a modern game controller with it's millions of buttons. Give me a one (I'll be generous, two) button joystick any day over these modern monstrosities.
6. Babbages. Yes, that came later, but a store devoted to computer gaming? Heaven! I had a friend who was a manager there. They were allowed to take home and "test drive" the software. I was so mad when he quit that job!!!
7. The simplicity and closeness to hardware. You can't manipulate hardware nowadays like you used to. Everything was easy to get to via software. The software itself was simple and straightforward. You don't get that today.
The things I don't miss:
1. Tape loading... who would be crazy to name that as a good thing? That was awful. There's a reason why everyone switched to floppies if they could.
2. Lack of access to information about your computer. The books and magazines were great, but getting the right book or back issues of the right magazine were often difficult to find... There was no access to code libraries or helpful info if you ran into a problem programming or using your machine.
3. Getting software. It could be tough finding retail outlets that sold your stuff, and very few things came at a discount. That was another good reason to learn how to program.
4. Single tasking. We are spoiled nowadays with our ability to run multiple programs at the same time. Back then, on some computers, just loading up a DOS file directory would cause you to lose all your work. Thanks to multitasking, we can emulate our beloved old computers at the same time we can do something else.. so overall, we certainly are better off today than before... but I still miss the old times.
Everything is better now everything is open source.
I miss demoscene entries that actually ran on the bare hardware and exploited its quirks... Nowadays it's mostly watching videos because you're lucky if you can actually get a release to run properly without barfing out to the desktop for some missing library or it just doesn't agree with your GPU
Twinstiq, game news
My ASR-33 Teletype and my MITS Altair 8080. I so badly wanted that 6MB hard disk costing $6K
Fortunately after I had spent $765 for the 16K RAM board I was flat broke...
I built my first computer by populating an S100 board with an 8080 and discrete logic and wirewrapping it myself. Had a pair of 8-inch floppies for storage, and a kit-built Heathkit H19 for a terminal. Ran CP/M on it. I don't miss that thing one bit. I love what I'm able to build these days with much more integrated components, and I love the enormous functionality I can buy off-the-shelf for, effectively, peanuts if I don't feel like building it. Particularly via AliExpress (just got a sweet component tester that can give transistor or diode parameters, or the values of passives. Twenty bucks. Could never have had anything like it back in the day.) Not to mention what the internet has wrought in terms of instantly-available information. No nostalgia here.
With so many layers of API, IDE, 4g languages, who the hell knows what is happening underneath?
Stop holding my hand so hard, let me figure things out myself.
Keeping in mind the time, this thing had it all over the typical IBM PC of the day. Those little disks, actual multitasking, nice built in graphics. I had a nice little side business doing weddings after I bought an Amiga 2000, and the necessary camera and editing equipment. Eventually I talked my main work into a 3000 and frame buffer, and showing them what I could do in making 3-D animations in Imagine, and their use in science. I did all this with my A3000, which was my favorite Amiga of all. My last Amiga was the 4000, with a video Toaster and Lightwave. The old Deluxe Paint 2, 3, and 4 were in constant use. The machines were just plain fun to use. I was making 3-D animations and videos with frame buffers and VTR control software, while my Microsoft based colleagues were all excited when they got the right escape codes to print landscape.
But Commodore was a badly run company, and the promise that the A4000 had went away when they went belly up. Fortunately, this was around the time when non-linear editing and computer and video speed were catching up to the Amiga, and My next system was a Mac Pro. I continued to use Lightwave, in part because the 3-D learning curve is steep as hell, and fortunately NewTek makes it for Mac.
Those were some pretty heady and fun days, to grow up with the computing revolution. I still enjoy it, but no where near as much as with the old Amigas.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I greatly prefer the mechanical disc eject mechanisms
The os has no need to decide for me when it's safe to remove the disc.
I don't care if it is burning a disc it's been stuck at 100% for the last half hour.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I miss rotary dials on phones. And polio.
You are welcome on my lawn.
but my favorite OS was Windows Server 2003. The Windows 2k interface on top of NT. It wasn't easy finding hardware with drivers for it, but it never ever crashed.
My favorite monitor was an SGI 1600SW monitor. I swear, that pixel density was like looking at a piece of paper.
I started on a . Capabilities were obviously limited, but magazines published programs for a wide rage of games, practical problems and science. Both professional scientists and ordinary people learned programming and sometimes left a calculator number crunching for days to find out something they considered interesting.
I wonder where we would be if we displayed same passion for learning and innovation with today's technology.
Well, a barely insightful comment there, but seriously disappointed by the lack of "funny" comments on this target-rich topic. Or is my memory fooling me about how much fun and laughter we had back then?
However, the one that was missing from the article and so far not here in the Slashdot comments is something I would call "depth of control". In the days before magic black boxes we could actually understand how our computers worked from top to bottom. One example I remember involved debugging an application program. Can't even remember if it was 8 or 16 bits (though it was running on an S-100 system that had two CPUs and could actually run both), but I remember my debugging actually went into the OS and I wound up "fixing" it by replacing one OS call in the application executable with a closely related call. I think the rise of the black boxes began with the Mac but didn't triumph until Microsoft went mousing along ca Windows 95 or 2000.
Might be I've lost my marbles or intestinal fortitude, but I wouldn't even try it with any of the machines I'm using these days. Not even the tiny harmless-looking little smartphones.
Black boxes to the right of them,
Black boxes to the left of them,
Black boxes in front of them...
Apologies to Lord Tennyson.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Lets face it we were working with some seriously under rated hardware. 1Mhz processors and 16Kb of ram led to you having to actually be creative as well as have a rather good understanding of maths and assembler.
In the MS-DOS / floppy disk days, you had far more security. Your entire operating system was write-protected, and you could make a copy of it, and test that copy, all in less than 10 minutes.
These days, you can't even clone your hard drive and have reasonable assurance that all your apps will work without being re-authorized.
So what do I miss? I miss software that works.
That works where? On an original Commodore Green-Screen? An Apple-II? A TRS-80? A Commodore 64? A VIC-20? An Atari? One of those Sinclairs with the hex keypad?
I hear ya, but remember that back then it was just a given that software worked only in one environment. The ultimate walled garden. The notion that software would run on anything else beside what it was written for was all but science fiction.
I agree with you, but that model kinda worked. I've been involved in three different projects replacing legacy software that had worked for 15, 20 years, and in all three instances the bleeding-edge upgrade left the companies with less value, and two of them went through a full rewrite within 2-3 years.
For instance, take an "obsolete" inventory management system running on HP3000 PowerHouse and replace it with a state-of-the-art J2EE marvel running on WebLogic and Oracle. A few millions later champagne was flowing during the Go Live, but users could no longer search the inventory by packing slip number or get daily list of slow moving SKUs so they could optimize the floor layout. Or take a shop floor data collection system based on COPICS and running on S/370, and replace it with a fantastic ASP web app running on IIS and Access (no shit), later replaced with a XML-powered piece of shit WebMethods implementation that was so slow that foremen could get their numbers faster by walking around and counting stuff with a handheld mechanical clicker like some fucking doormen.
In enterprise world at least, hardware has improved a lot but software has gone downhill. I'm not saying an ember screen is sexier than an iPhone app, but ERP/MRP used to work and now they don't. Geez, for 30+ years Readers' Digest has successfully managed the most amazing CRM in history - so advanced and reliable that USPS was contracting them to double-check their postal data - on an old mainframe running a piece of software created before a man set foot on the moon; then they tried to "upgrade" to a stinking pile of garbage based on Affinium (now NetInsight) and Ab Initio, and after ten years the migration was still not completed.
Yeah, we now have BDDs and DSLs and BPELs, we have SPARQLs and RDDs, we have ORMs and NoSQLs and microservices, but somehow we can't get enterprise software that work better than decades-old programs punch-carded by people who looked like Marty Mcfly's father. What's up with that.
lucm, indeed.
One side effect of BASIC was that if you bought software written in it you got the source code. At least from Radio Shack. Result was a bookkeeping package on tapes that was easy to modify to run in overlays once I got floppy disk drives and LDOS. It actually worked, had only one bug that ever affected me (easily patched), and was actually well structured - looked like it had been written by somebody in their corporate IT dept.
seriously am i the only person who remembers listening to the handshake noises that your modem used to make? it was the confirmation that you were connected to the world outside your own! i specifically miss the ker-shploink noise of the V.42 modems, which occupy a spot in my heart right next to zmodem
many memories, thankfully most of them I am happy to leave behind
half a day wasted configuring and diagnosing friends PC's before we can start our LAN party
waiting half an hour for a tape to finish loading only to error and have to start again
finding my expensive 14.4k baud modem couldn't maintain connections above about 4800 due to poor line quality meaning many many hours to download games from those Warez sites.
tuning the load order and memory usage of drivers to ensure you have enough contiguous memory to load a game.
Those low res graphics at the time were fine as they were awesome for their time, games were new and original rather than just rehashes like today.
"...when they weren't playing the original side-scrolling platformers like Mario Bros and Donkey Kong at video arcades"
Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong were platform games, but neither was a side-scroller, FWIW.
The side-scrollers I remember liking best were Jungle King, Moon Patrol, Scramble, Defender, Zaxxon, Vanguard...
There were all these companies out there before the big shakeout. Trying to think of names I come up with "Smoke Signal Broadcasting" which I think sold a Motorola 6800 based system. Somebody sold a system based on the Cosmac Elf. There was the Kim 1 with 256 bytes of memory (yes bytes) and a 6502. Most systems were Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 based. North Star and Cromemco are 2 names I remember. Somebody sold a system based on the Signetics 2650 CPU (very short lived.) Heathkit had an LSI 11 based system. Radioshack a 6809 system, the Coco or color computer.
There were also disc drives, keyboards, simple display setups, gadgets to operate IBM selectric typewriters as printers. I'm trying to remember now, but it's fuzzy, and I can't remember prices (which changed rapidly anyway.) One Byte or Creative Computing or Dr Dobbs from that time would bring clarity just from reading the ads.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I recall watching an interview in which Jobs explained why the Lisa cost so much. Remember that Apple hired a bunch of PARC people back then? That's the thing, their fatal mistake was that they retained a Xerox mindset. They thought their clientele was still upscale offices for whom a $10,000 workstation was a very reasonable expense.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Hardware has improved, but software bloat just eats that up anyway.
The Windows 2000 interface was better than anything MS has come up with so far.
MS-Office is not much better.
Ubuntu has been going downhill since 10.4.
I suppose there has been some progress, but not much.
LOGO on Apple 2s.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Fred Fish! (Any Amiga owners from the '80's would recognize the reference.) He was, in fact, a real person. We were in the same division within Motorola Computer Group at one time, though I knew of him from the Amiga world well before I met him in person.
The Turbo Switch!
Also, seven-segment displays on the front of the PC showing the Mhz of the processor.
I miss playing games like Ultima, or the Bard's Tale where you had to use a lot of your own imagination, because there was no voice over and no fancy graphics. Don't get me wrong, movie like experiences like The Witcher 3 are awesome, but it's not quite the same.
From TFA...
"It was at this point that the entire industry moved over to 3D rendering. Sega failed to anticipate this, with its Saturn console, while the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 excelled in this area. Subsequently, Sega never made a console again."
BZZZZZT! How can he not remember the actual final console Sega made? The Dreamcast, not the Saturn, was their last; and it did do 3D.
"Mario Bros, an arcade game that was later ported to the home platforms. This first Mario game has most of the elements that we now think of as intrinsic to platform games as it’s a scrolling game world made up levels to be traversed to completion."
Again, BZZZZZZZTTTTT!!! Mario Brothers was not a side scroller. It was a nonscrolling platformer (and I believe the first to introduce Luigi). The game the author is describing is Super Mario Brothers. I would bet he thinks Mario didn't get named until then either (I think in Donkey Kong Jr., he got renamed from his original Jumpman moniker from DK, to Mario, where he was the "villain."
Those two errors do a lot to destroy any credibility this guy has as a writer on classic video game and computer history.
"Game over. Press Redo or Back." (Always thought the gal who did the female voice for TI-99/4a Speech Synthesizer games sounded hot.)
This space unintentionally left blank.
With MAYBE a cfg file.
None of this installer shite.
The old browser Netscape I really liked, it took an entire day to download and was really slow but that animated old ship wheel was really appealing, it felt like I was actually sailing of to different part of the planet.
[($)]
What I loved about early computers (well, early to me anyway) was that I was computing at all. It wasn't that they were objectively great. It's that they were physically present.
On the other hand, I really loved early game consoles. You'd just slap a game in and play it. You might have to wait a couple of seconds here and there while the devs did something tricky to get around small storage space.
Actually, I did love something about some of my early computers, one family to be precise: The Amigas. They whipped the living crap out of competition which cost multiples of the price. But those days are gone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1. The Amiga 1000 would have shipped with a 68010 from day one. It only cost a few dollars more than a 68000, and would have ensured that 98% of all the good games that came out for the next 5 years wouldn't crash, burn, and die a horrible death on anything with a 68020+ due to the copy protection using MOVE SR, <ea>.
2. I would have BEGGED Jay Miner for a "semi-chunky" 4-bit graphics mode that used a byte per pixel, but read either the high or low nybble (set by a register bit). So you could write the low nybbles, display them, update the high nybbles, switch to them, update the low nybbles, switch to them, etc. And had a graceful update path for ECS to make it a true 8-bit mode.
3. I would have tied up the CEO of Gravis and beat him with a rubber hose until he agreed to let the engineers add a SB-compatible FM and DAC to it (for perfect compatibility with SB-only software, instead of endless fucking misery with SBOS that never really worked right). Or at least, could take a daughterboard with SB-compatible chips (so they could keep the lower price point without permanently gimping it). Or even just had a fucking 1/8" stereo jack for input from a second soundcard that got mixed 50/50 with the GUS's native audio (enabled with a jumper), so you could have both a GUS and a SBpro without having to switch cables or spend a hundred bucks on an external mixer.
4. I would have leaked the whole story of HP's CD-R design debacle to the media before they had a chance to ship (ie, HP's engineers *knew* beyond doubt that shipping a CD writer without a dedicated RAM buffer was GUARANTEED to turn at least 1 in 4 discs into a coaster, but HP's management ignored their protests).
5. I would have made an equally made a big stink in the media about PC-CHIPS's fake "WRITE-BACK cache" circa 1993 (literally, bars of plastic with metal pins soldered to the motherboard, and a BIOS that flat-out LIED about it).
Best I've seen, it not only allowed a backspace it removes the previous character that remained as part of the password.
mac os 6.08 graphics, resedit, and hypercard. nothing will ever be as magical as that world.
Realistically, I miss the Windows 7 and XP UIs the most. Very natural and easy compared to Windows 8.x and 10.
And the bootleg Macintosh emulator! Painting with 32 colours (and not being able to print in anything but black and white). The noise of the keyboard and the floppy drive (I can still do a fair imitation of that).
realkiwi
I also liked core memory. You halted the system and turned it off. An hour or a week later, you turned it on and pressed "Continue" and you were right where you left off.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
What I really miss ... after the "hobby computers" - the ELF and VIP and so on - they all came with a programming language, generally BASIC. Mind you, they were all different in some small details, but be it the Apple II, the VIC-20 and C-64, the Atari, the Spectrum or even the early IBM PCs you could sit down and write simple to moderately complex code and run it immediately. Not that it was all that fast of course, but it gave you a sense of being able to do something yourself. These days a computer comes with a bunch of bundled software - most of which you either don't want or would have to activate (pay additional money for) or both - but nothing that lets you say "I did this myself".
I miss being the customer and not the product. I miss being the owner of the things I buy. I miss having schematics of my hardware. I miss software without ads. I miss software without a due date. I miss having printers that were printers instead of a DMCA scheme designed to get my money. I miss being able to purchase something and being able to give it to a friend later.
I even miss underpowered computers with non-standard operating systems. Mostly because programmers had to try harder, and all the standard operating systems we have today, well, suck.
After years of C64 with casette and then a 5.25floppy, with an add on cartridge to freeze games to edit hex numbers to try to find and edit the number of gold I had in the game, I still remember the amusement I had when I saw a 80286 Packard Bell PC of my cousin with a harddrive and loading a game called "Flight Simulator" :) with a few blinks of a yellow light on its case. When it accessed harddrive it made few low pitched sounds, like magic! And I said WOOOW !!! After a year of asking my dad bought me a PC, a 80386DX40, 2MB ram, 64KB cache, WOOOOW. I would die for it, And I remember when I paid a lot for a magazines first issue, "Boot" magazine. And my first 3dfx card for 300bucks.
The excitement of each generation of hardware and software was like going to another galaxy. Now I have some employees, early 20's. Their games like outrage etc dont look any more improved than 10 or 15 years ago. I feel they missed the best years of computer and software evolution.
When they did what you told them, and nothing else.
I miss the days of DOS where you knew the only program running was the stuff that you'd set to run.
I also miss when GUI's were nothing more than GUI's. You have no idea how blazingly responsive a Windows 3.1 GUI could be on an early Pentium with 8Mb RAM. It flew. Because all it was doing was drawing boxes.
DOS 3.3 disk-2-disk copy took forever, Locksmith took about 15 seconds and could recognize half-tracks, thus defeating a common copy protection scheme. And the assembly for it was about 2k.
Those are not what I would call very old :-)
The first computer I learned to program was originally built in 1966 and later donated to our university in the mid '70s http://2eo.blogspot.ie/2007/12...
Maybe I mostly remember the slings and arrows -- these so-called BASIC program listings that were about eight lines of actual readable (and thus re-writeable) BASIC code and the rest of the page or pages being DATA statements with numbers. Then the PCs came, and we could, if sufficiently masochistic, type in similar listings to use with DEBUG.EXE. Later, as software grew larger, there soon came the need of faffing about with config.sys and autoexec.bat so that available memory was maximized. In the late 1980s onwards, there were the expanded memory nonsense too and more and more options and things in config.sys. There there would be jumper settings so DMA channels, port-addresses and interrupt lines on the various plug-in cards in the PCs. This continued well into the 1990s, then that got replaced by something called Plug-and-play which maybe, maybe not, did work, thus everyone called it "Plug-and-pray". And all on the original 640K plus whatever High memory had been put into place. I do not miss any of all this. TFS mentions the dreariness of business computing. they are absolutely right!
But I might not be typical -- I started with learning FORTRAN, then after that BASIC seemed primitive (no functions? and thus no data hiding? i have to make sure I don't re-use any of the variable-names anywhere else? and only one letter? at least FORTRAN allowed me to use six! bah) but the PC-compatible had Turbo Pascal, and there was also the assembler and later, Turbo C, so that became a nice set-up, with direct control of the pins on the parallell and serial ports, and even some DIY card with A-D converters! Yay!
Then there were the wonderful Unix systems, HP-UX and AIX back around the mid-1980s, where you could actually do more than one thing at a time without the machine crashing. And even if your program decided to hang, or accessed some memory out of bounds, it would say "bus error" or "segmentation fault" and stop, but the rest of the system, including other programs, would continue happily along as if nothing had happened. These even had networking so we could have programs on one machine talk with programs on another machine.
Of course this didn't last. Those Unix systems were way too expensive. Instead, Windows NT happened, and a form of multitasking and even eventually a useful networking system (TCP/IP is useful, all the other weird and wonderful variants turned out not to be so) and the access to the parallell port vanished, while the support for the serial ports became increasingly wobbly. ISA, EISA, Micro Channel, and MS-DOS became dinosaurs soon after; parallell and serial ports followed on as being branded "legacy". And like the dinosaurs, some of their descendants are still around now: RS-232 serial ports never really went away completely. USB came, but turned out to not be as hacker-friendly as those serial ports -- there is a reason everyone today runs (RS-232 style) serial via USB using a pl2303 or FTDI or similar chip to talk and listen to the UART in their SBC or microcontroller board.
There was a sort of dark age, of PCs running klunky MS-DOS or slightly less klunky Windows, until the late half of the 1990s, when Linux distros became easily available, and so good that they actually worked right on some reasonable random PC hardware that would be available, and all the good old Unix ways of doing things finally became economically feasible, intially on PCs, many of them second-hand. Around the middle of the 2000s the first single-board computers started showing up, and some of these are now becoming as understandable and documented as those old 8088 PCs with their MS-DOS once were.
To some extent we are in a golden age right now.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Definitely: "downloading" recording games from FM radio on a tape and being able to play them on the C64
It presents you with a command prompt, ready to be programmed on. You can do things like shell one-liners to automate pieces of your work as you go on, without entering any special programming modes. And when you need to do more serious programming, there are no artificial barriers. In short, it doesn't enforce any unnecessary separation between users and developers.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Related to understanding the whole stack: You also knew exactly what your computer was doing. Why is the disk thrashing? Because you just started a program to do X. There was a very direct relationship to what you asked the computer to do, and what the computer did. Programs and activities had rhythms to them (visual and aural). If you saw/heard something unexpected, this was an immediate indication that something was wrong.
Nowadays: Why is my disk busy? No idea. What program is sending crap across the network? No idea. WTF are those 1000 or so threads doing in the background? No idea on at least half of them...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
[...] the original side-scrolling platformers like Mario Bros and Donkey Kong at video arcades.
Donkey Kong is not a side-scroller....
I used to have (under Linux) a thing that did something and another thing that did something else.
Now I have a PC with a bios that tries to do everything, starting a bootloader that tries to do everything, running a desktop manager that tries to do everything to launch a browser that tries to do everything, to visit a site that tries to do everything.
And when _I_ try to do anything, it breaks and when I ask for help, they all point to others because their software is perfect.
And do not even try to change settings in a human readable file, because if you are lucky, it will be overwritten by who knows what and that would be the best outcome.
And asking questions on how to do that, the RTFM is not available and the FAQ is something not even the writer or the developer can understand and all other documentation just says : you need X, Y and Z and the versuon you run is not the correct one and if you install the correct one, 7 other programs will break and will never work again.
So all you can hope for is to install something, hope it works and never do any upgrades, because that will break the system.
So what will I really miss? Being the boss over my own PC with tools that are usable by a human of average intelligence, not just by some Linux Guru who is only interested in his small little world, just so I can use it how I like it.
This fredom has been taken away by removing simplicity.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
My first 'personal' computer was a Heathkit DEC PDP11/03, a 16bit machine with 4k of memory -- adequate to run Focal off of paper tape. But saving programs on punch tape was a stone drag. And come to think of it, so was the boot process -- toggle in the octal code for the primary bootstrap to read the absolute loader from the tape reader. Then you could load your program. Didn't take too long before the joy of having a punch bind and wreck a long save really got on your nerves. So scrape together the money to get the Heath dual " floppy and (of course) more memory. Eventually ending up with a 60" rack and a pair of surplus RK05 hard drives ... oooh, 3.5megabytes of hard disk. It was a beast and with a startup surge of over 100amps you knew when it was booting. But was it every reliable... and RT11 was a decent operating system. Lightyears ahead of DOS -- when it came out later.
One thing that helped, and I really miss, is when something went wrong, the error message traceback took you to the line of code that was wrong -- divide by zero, undefined variable, etc. And when stuff got weird, a crash dump that could be walked through using a debugger would tell volumes. None of this pipelined execution that quickly loses locality of problems. Recall walking through a huge dump of a Vax with 50 people on it where the application would hang and everything would cascade to a stop... weeks of crawling through buffers and up and down call stacks. But found and fixed the problem.
On the other hand, its nice to be a user now and just not have to care anymore. But when something screws up my thought is 'sloppy programmer' rather than that expletive computer. But in the rush to get to the future, rock solid reliability and the clarity it required got left at the roadside. The true miracle is that anything works at all.
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It's funny to see people here reminiscing about the 90s. I reminisce about that decade too, but the fondest memories I have are of my Sinclair ZX-81, and CoCo 2, and TRS-80 Model III, back in the 80s.
Nuff said.
Coding involved a chisel and a stone tablet.
And the Ten Commandments, remember?
I think object oriented works better in theory than in practice.
Of all the things I miss most about the era of "old computers" (for me this means early 80's), it's the culture of BBS systems that I miss the most. Operating under a pseudonym was extremely liberating, and by separating the individual from existing notions of age, gender, race, etc, the discourse could focus almost exclusively on the ideas being presented. The fact that the medium was entirely text-based during this period was a benefit, as it supported the stripping away of elements outside of the ideas. While the user base was smaller and more segmented, introduction of FIDONet helped expand interaction between sub-communities.
Looking at the evolution of online communities, and specifically the advent of social media, I personally find that we've moved in an absolutely contrary direction where social media environments create a focus on crafting an _image_ of a particular individual through photos, videos, and streams highlighting characteristics of the poster (irregardless of whether they actually apply to the posting user) and de-emphasize any true interaction around the core ideas being applied. It looks to me less a medium for discourse and discovery of new ideas, and more one for finding pockets of support and self-validation for ideas already held.
That's how I see things now, but perhaps it's just because I'm getting old and curmudgeonly...
On the other hand, I don't miss the XModem file transfer protocol (with it's stupid extra bytes at the end) at all. :-)
The first computer game I spent substantial time on was the text game adventure.demo on a Honeywell Sigma 6. I was taught to program on that computer on Hollerith Cards, but after a couple of years at college they hooked up some user terminals. Going to the computer lab to play the game gave me a chance to talk to actual computer geeks and get started with my knowledge of computers.
This is where Eternal September comes in as a more general concept.
Honestly, discovering that a few inches of duct tape could keep the memory expansion pack from wiggling and dumping all of the work that I'd keyed into my ZX81 is by far my fondest computer memory. The sheer JOY of realizing that I'd only have to pound a program into that hellish little keyboard once...
The golden-age/wild-west days of computing when you could charge stupid amounts of money for relatively simple bits of code.
The perfume of warming discrete hardware and ozone.
The feeling of release as the dot matrix hammered out a final copy.
The surprisingly entertaining 8 bit music emanating from apps like Phoneman.
trying to manually assign interrupts to different pieces of hardware in a computer, then juggle all of them again if anything changed. Those were the days!
I miss the days when computer viruses and hackers were not a threat. Back in the late 70's and early 80's the systems were so primitive the was no way for external users to get into your systems.
Maybe this is part of the attraction I have for the Arduino.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Back in the days I see some BASIC program in Byte magazine so immediately type it in and run it. I then go back and read the article of what this program is supposed to do which typically does something I don't care/know or there is something missing like Mat(A) command or some weird thing I have no idea. But now this is the 21st century where we diligently plan and do proper project management to avoid costly overruns and schedule delays (oh wait, we still to that now).
mfwright@batnet.com
Instant off. When you hit the power button, it flipped off. None of this "Please wait while shutting down" nonsense for 5 minutes.
I miss the feeling of extra power that gave on my family 386/66. Though I know that, more accurately, it was there for deliberate slowing down (to 33MHz in my case!) when it was off.
loading programs from cassette I don't miss one bit. "IO Error" was more common that an actual load on my old CoCo!
Colonel David Winthrop of World Power Systems. (I had to go and look it up!) He sold interesting, inexpensive, and miraculous hardware to unsuspecting customers. And it WORKED!
Well, the sale did, anyway. Nothing like advertising a little and having the money pile up for free! All you have to do is keep pushing out the delivery time a bit more.
Oh, that was also the time I first got burned with a floppy? manufacturer at a computer shop. We'd call the vendor to hear "You're the only one having that problem, it must be you" and believe them, and then try to fix it ourselves. A year or so later, found out that they were telling that to EVERYONE that called.
The Beginning of The End of Innocence -- at least for me. Now I'm just an old cynical bastard who still wants to believe but can't. (Yet I still try occasionally.)
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
I miss the one Apple IIe in the back of every classroom that no one else knew how to use. "Computers are the future, and so we need them in the classroom!" and our school system bought one Apple IIe for each classroom, that sat there, unused.
In the 4th grade we had to do some project about the different types of biomes (tundra, desert, deciduous forest, rain forest, etc). So most people made a diorama or something. I wrote a quiz game in BASIC called "Name That Biome!" I included 20 questions from the textbook about the different biomes, and the program would pick 10 at random, ask them to the user, the user would enter their multiple choice answer, and then it would tell if you got it right or not, and then give you your score at the end. This was wizardy to the teacher, so I got a 100. And after that every year up through high school there was some project or another in one of my classes where I could just swap out the questions and the game became "Name That State!" "Name That Napoleonic Wars Battle!" Took only a few minutes and got an A every time. Good times.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I miss the assember, SID chip, VIC chip, Expert Cartridge, Rob Hubbard, Sensible Software, border sprites, Mules Music Demo, catching the raster to do sprite multiplexing... *sigh*
Recently bought a second had C64C off e-bay and got a device that allows me to load games off a SD card. Wizball still sounds great. DropZone still looks amazing.
Developing C++ on Linux for multi-threaded server applications is no where near as interesting/taxing.
> 15. Text adventures
I had to laugh at this one as I have Zork on my iPad.
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I had installed Server 2003 32bit, w/o paying for it. It could run another desktop in a window (with RDP). That was really cool but software licensing would lock it out after a few months. Drivers were dead easy as it ran the 2K/XP ones for everything, because 32 bit version. (only the xbox 360 controller driver refused to install but you could extract it from the .exe archives and install it in device manager)
I eventually moved to XP SP2 but 2k3 was really great. It taught me how to use and set up XP, actually. It is a version of XP, you install it and boot into a desktop that runs all the games that XP did.
My regret is not upgrading from Windows 7 32bit to XP 64bit, what a pile of ugly dog slow version 7 was.
Hardly. The Hobby Computer Club (Holland and Flanders) is going strong after 40 years.
1. Front panels. Real computers had front panels with blinking lights and switches.
2. Being the only person for miles around that had a computer in their house
3. Hacking wasn't hacking. We'd program modems to call every number in our LEX and log the ones that were computers. The computers we found we'd try to identify, and if they were PDP-11's or VAXes we'd login and leave them a friendly message. This wasn't considered bad activity at all - we were doing them a FAVOR by letting them know they were insecure.
4. Physically touching big iron. Mounting heavy disk packs, hanging tapes, loading diagnostics from paper tape. Data Centers were cool places and only the super cool people got to work in there. It destroyed my hearing but it was worth it.
5. Relying on a wall of notebooks that contained absolutely everything you ever needed to know about the hardware and software. If you needed answers they were there.
6. The relaxed work pace, It took 20 minutes to log in. We'd sign up for compiles, maybe get two a day. Loading the editor, 20 minutes. Saving your code, 20 minutes. Compiling took an hour. During those times the programmers would drink coffee, share tricks, learn from each other.
7. Leaving the office at 5:00, going home to work on your home computer, and never, ever getting called from work.
8. Upgrading from 1200 baud Kansas City Standard leaderless cassettes to Micropolis hard sector floppies. My first home hard drive, a Shugart SA-1000 that distorted the TV picture of every TV within 500 feet so I could only use it late at night. The beautiful wood case on my Northstar Horizon. My first TIL from scratch in z80 assembler. "Inventing" the idea of a DLL.
9. My second year as a programmer we got lower case chips in our Lier Siegler ADM-3's, but we could only print in upper case. We thought "Wow you could actually write someone a letter on this thing wouldn't that be cool"
10. Explaining to non computer people how many telephone books we could store on a disk drive. In those days a telephone book was big data.
11. Writing one's database from scratch, or fixing bugs in the Borland Database Toolbox.
What I don't miss:
1. Staying up all night hanging tapes because backup boy called in sick.
2. Soldering RS-232 connectors
3. Terminals that used paper, like the ASR 43 or the LA120 DecWriter
4. Programmers in "Data Processing" typically worked behind glass windows with the machine behind a glass window inside the room we worked in. Management would give tours and we always felt like moneys in a cage.
5. Pascal, Fortran, and COBOL
6. ALL programmers smoked and drank tons of coffee. I had a 12" wide ashtray on my desk.
Murphy was an optimist
Chances are that Millenials and XGen-ers have no clue what it was like back in the day when times were simpler.
Some folks do yearn for those days.
I remember enjoying the times, yet also being excited about the possibilities and promises of the potential future.
The thing I miss the most is the general 'honesty' and openness of the industry back then.
Now a days, it has all become a matter of capitalistic profits.
I miss integrity, responsibility, and honesty of working for a harmonious society.
Now, it seems that we have armed monkeys with a machine gun; and corporate inhuman entities with potentially insurmountable oppressive methods.
Let's get educated and use those tools to better society as a whole.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Really? Things have changed significantly and we get it. Less control over something much more complex is a given. It's not just with computers. Heck, take a look at cars. I feel like we'd still be using the Strowger Switch if some of the cavemen here were the leaders of tech.
The comments here seem to be in two groups. People reminiscing about how awesome the microcomputer age was, and kids who think this is about the time of PCs and MS-DOS, going "nu-uh!" Kids, you're about 10 years off.
It's amazing the things you could tell about a computer by looking at the patterns the lights on an IMSAI 8080 when it was running, not to mention just being pretty.
tl;dr bitch bitch bitch--but to be honest--keep doing what y'all are doing; it's working.
Abstractions of abstractions of abstractions....you can't even see the first turtle from the top.
Yes, I understand we get some functionality for the price we pay--but it seems to be the way of the rocket--90% of your fuel is expended just accelerating your fuel.
I've got (lemme see...) 12 VMs on my laptop right now--just because things don't play nice with other things or customers want development in specific versions.
So--yeah--I have no illusions the complexity is going away.
But, for all the fancy crap, the functionality is basically the same: Operator touches the screen. Conveyor starts running and knife starts chopping.
I click "send". Couple seconds later my Dad gets an email.
Things were so much simpler back then, and we don't seem to have any real advance in function.
Of course, I don't have to install a separate print and screen driver for each program.
And spend hours tweaking the EMM386 stuff in config.sys.
and...and...and...
Well, that's the thing about nostalgia--some of our fondest memories never happened.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
To tell you all the truth I wish that I was born earlier so that I can experience the things that everyone on this comment section experienced. However I know that there are things that I am experiencing that I wouldn't experienced in the 80s. Like the opportunity to get a boyfriend or to have much greater computing power at my fingertips allowing me to write much more complex programs that only a 80s mainframe can run.
As I sit here next to my Commodore 64 and Double Dragon arcade cabinet, remembering the days of being a teenager calling local BBSes to chat with friends, dreading the next school day where I'd be away from my computer for a good 8 hours, having to deal with real-life social situations like avoiding jocks wanting to push me in the hallway.
At least we have Linux, it seems that the golden age of computing has all but turned into commercialism and dominant players squashing the little guys who actually care about the technology first, and money second.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Been running text games on various addresses for over a dozen years.
Latest Tournament game regenerated Yesterday:
To connect, use Telnet or VT to: empire.openmpe.com
The log on command is HELLO PLAYER.EMPIRE4
Game parameters are:
- 599x599 sector grid
- 99 islands, starting island is random
- build and movement points accumulate every 60 minutes
- 0 starting time units
- ship movement is updated every 6 hours
- 255 Player limit
- Player identification is created on first log on
- Game is always open, no sign ups required
- Normal information hiding
This message generated by a batch job on the Empire machine. (Cut and pasted manually.)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
You know what I miss? I miss being able to type text input as fast as my hands could go, without an hourglass or hanging pause. And it's not like I type any faster now than I did on a C64.
There's no challenge anymore. No mods permitted anymore, and no mod sites. doesn't matter if it were mac or pc, although usually we all had both, and often a third OS running on (usually) a pc.. although I had BeOS on a mac.. No thrill of successfuly connecting via dialup to a BBS, etc etc. It feels a bit of a loss.It's all just too easy nowadays...
I had a Commodore 64 and an Amiga, both totally fanless systems. Although the Amiga 2000 and on came in tower cases which would have been good for cooling compared to a keyboard computer. It was either the 386 or the 486 that introduced the need for fans with their turbo modes, then everything just went downhill :p
computing itself is still pretty much fun these days, whatever you miss from the old days you can fire up an old machine or emulator just as easy.
what has changed, and probably will never come back is the culture around it, which was very different.
a simple example is a book store, if you were lucky and the book store had a computer section, it was filled with cool high tech books. walk into a book store now and find useless bs like masterin your iphone, photoshop mastery in 24h, internet explorer unlocked, surfing the world wide web.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Windows 2k was an NT kernel. The home line went from 95 to 98 to ME; NT4 became 2k which grew to 2003.
I miss the simplicity of it all. Sure, everyone pines for "simpler times" no matter what era they're from, but there's a striking difference in simplicity between computers of the 90s and computers of today. The biggest change is internet access and the requirement for it. Back on Windows 98 and Windows XP (and even, to some extent, Windows 7), things just worked. Sure, you could have an "active desktop" that displayed web content, but it wasn't a requirement. The only DRM was software keys or manual lookups ("what's the word on page 93"), and we could physically manage our disks and documentation. Single-player games could be played without an internet connection, and usually the first releases of applications were actually stable, with no Day 1 patches or DLC.
These days, I hope either Windows 7 is supported forever, or Microsoft releases another OS that I actually like. Windows 8 and 10 just don't do it for me, and I have little hope that their successors will, either. I don't know. I think, somewhere along the way, I just got stuck in 2010 and now I want to stay there forever.