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

I miss software that works.

[mcmonkey]

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.

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.

[rtb61]

Memories, WTF, what I miss most is digital freedom. The POS state of affairs with corporations and governments spying on everyone all of the time is fucking bullshit. Can not trust hardware, can not trust software, can not trust the network, is has all become a digital steaming pile of bullshit. Digital rights is a joke foisted upon as by the pigopolists, rather than being the rights of individuals and their digital freedom, it is the right of corporations to fuck over individuals, this fucking shit has got to stop!

What I miss about computing of yesteryear

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

No bloatware

[edx93]

'nuff said.

Re:No bloatware

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Maybe before Windows came about. But Win 95 was absolutely chock-full of useless shit. The first thing everybody with any sense did back then was clean up the freshly-installed OS to have more disk space and speed things up.

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.

BASIC

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Guys like us we had it made

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight.

Gee, our Apple ][ ran great.

Those were the days.

Th best of days

[sit1963nz]

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.

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.

Re:Going to the arcade as a group

[Scarletdown]

My big Asteroids memory was at our local truck stop. I was never very good at it, but I did frequently go ahead and enter initials when someone else would finish and not notice they made the high score board.

I just hope that in the future, some interstellar military talent scout doesn't find out that I was the one who would sign the abandoned boards as FUK, and then insist that I must join other 80s greats, like ASS, DIK, CUM, TIT, and CNT to save the world against an imminent combined asteroid bombardment and flying saucer attack.

Manuals!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Being able to understand the whole stack

[williamyf]

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...

Write-protect tabs

[dottrap]

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.

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.

it has come to this

[lucm]

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.

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.