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!"

Comments

Re:I miss software that works.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Hmm, I think memory is failing you here. I clearly remember many, many programs randomly crashing and taking the entire OS with it - and losing hours of work in the process, having to fiddle with hi memory and extended memory in DOS for hours to get some half-assed program to work, installing version after version of certain buggy drivers and goofing around with interrupt jumpers to get a somewhat stable system, etc etc etc. And the worst thing was trying to figure it all out on my own, without any internet forum to help me out.

It was fun at times, but mostly frustrating. I sure ain't missing those days...

Re:I miss software that works.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

No, I'm saying software back then was buggier than it is today overall - either shoddily coded, taking certain OS settings for granted, or using undocumented system calls - in an environment where any old rogue program could do anything it wanted or take down the entire system. Anybody who remembers software working better back then remembers wrong.

Incidentally, to the credit of Microsoft, Windows was a masterpiece of backward compatibility for a long time, considering the amount of badly coded 16-bit and 32-bit shit programs it had to run properly.

Going to the arcade as a group

[HockeyPuck]

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.

Creating my own S100 computer

[mykepredko]

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.

My old Amiga

[Ol Olsoc]

While I started out like so many people, on a Commodore 64, My computing life really took off when I bought one of the Commodore Amiga 500's.

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.

Has there been much progress since 2000?

[walterbyrd]

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.

Re:No bloatware

[Z00L00K]

That - and I also miss being in control of my system. This is something we have lost with all those magic processes running in Windows or elusive ghost problems caused by Systemd.

The good, the bad, and the ugly...

[Ashtead]

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.

Simplicity

[houghi]

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.

Re:I miss software that works.

[klubar]

Memory protection is not a new invention...

Many computers from more than 20 (or 30, or 40) years ago had memory protection. Even some of the PDP-8 with it's 12 bit words had memory protection and could run effective cloud computer (aka, timesharing) back in 1973. Lots of other machines of that era including the PDP-11 had memory protection. In addition, many of the mainframes had memory protection and would run VMs in their own memory space (VM370, and I think some of the 360). You could even run VMs in VMs down 10 levels deep.

Now you kids get off my lawn.