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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.)
Didn't need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our Apple ][ ran great.
Those were the days.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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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).
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
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.
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.