I frequently get hit by pangs of retrocomputing nostalgia, and I think I've finally figured out why I'm nevertheless not a retrocomputing enthusiast.
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I frequently get hit by pangs of retrocomputing nostalgia, and I think I've finally figured out why I'm nevertheless not a retrocomputing enthusiast.
Old computers seemed to promise a really, really cool future. They were supposed to be "bicycles for the mind", as Steve Jobs put it, and we'd all be empowered to do all sorts of cool and creative things with them.
Now I live in that future, and it sucks. No amount of playing with old computers will bring that promise back.
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@datarama
Retro futurism is where it's at, and you taught me that. We learn from what worked in the past and its dreams, and our dreams and lessons and imagine a better future into being. It's already there growing in the cracks. And flowers growing in cracks are still flowers. -
dataramareplied to Martijn Faassen last edited by [email protected]
@faassen My favourite flower is the common daisy, for mostly this reason. They will grow absolutely anywhere. You can pour all the asphalt and concrete you want, once the tooth of time has gnawed on it a bit, there will be daisies again.
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@datarama For me, there’s also an element of realism. Old computers were great, in part, because there was a fairly low upper limit on complexity of the software that they could run. Put a team of 100 software engineers on a project and they each have 1 KiB of RAM to play with. Most high-end commercial software was written by teams of 1-10 people. I, as a hobbyist, could build things of similar complexity to the best software you could buy.
I still can on such a system, but now it’s now nowhere near equivalent to a modern real system, it’s just playing in a sandbox, and if I wanted to do that Pharo is a much nicer sandbox than most old computers.
This is partly why I enjoy CHERIoT so much. It’s simple enough that I understand the entire hardware software stack (the last computer I owned where that was feasible for a single person was the BBC Model B, and that person was Sophie Wilson, not me) and, at the same time, it’s competitive with real systems. Admittedly, systems in a specific domain (small, embedded, connected to a network), but it’s a domain that includes billions of devices a year, even if I rarely think of most of them as ‘computers’.
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@david_chisnall Definitely. In the C64 days, it'd often be hard to distinguish whether a game was made by some teenager in their bedroom, or a team of professionals. I know one example of a critical piece of administrative software used by a mid-sized Danish public sector agency in the 80s that was written by a carpenter in his time off (this worked its way into employee jargon: "calling the carpenter" meant getting tech support).
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@david_chisnall Now, there's a lot of retrocomputing aesthetics I love: Pixel graphics (obviously) and chiptunes, for instance. But you don't need an actual old computer for any of that; you can choose some constraints to work within on a modern one, and you're fine. I make my pixel works with Aseprite on a modern Linux PC.
That said, there was a "coziness" in the experience with old hardware that I don't feel is there anymore, but that might just be me getting old and cranky.
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@datarama Except that’s not what people are building these days. They want cheat codes. They want autonomous vehicles so you don’t need a mind.
(I’ve pitched my work doing this exact phrase, my entire thing is that I build tools to augment the intelligence of SMEs, and what I constantly hear is that the business wants a magic bullet)
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dataramareplied to Matthew Lyon last edited by [email protected]
@mattly That's what I mean. I was promised a bicycle for the mind, but what I got was a cybertruck.