Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware.

After ditching my BBC B (I was poor), I remember using Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 4MB RAM that someone had thrown out and installing software to take over program manager and make it look like Win95 because my machine wasn't powerful enough to run Windows 95... How a second-hand 486DX was a revelation. 16MB of RAM! Unfathomable! What could use so MUCH RAM????

I also remember faffing with config.sys etc. to unload mouse drivers so I could run games that moaned about himem.sys in DOS. And telling every game that I really did have an Adlib sound card and a SoundBlaster 16. I really didn't. It was a £7.50 soundcard I bought from a boy at school (who now works at Amazon and has software patents, well done to him! He was really clever, wrote games, played piano like a pro too. Nice guy).

Then the upgrades to Win95, 98 (oooh Web desktop!), installing RedHat 5.2 (no, not RHEL 5.2), reading PC Plus and any magazine that mentioned Linux in an effort to learn more (dialup was expensive), and to make my abysmal VESA graphics card run X, then running FVWM, KDE1 (looked like CDE, how reassuring), GNOME1 (it's squishy), KDE2, 3.5 (perfection, everything was configurable) then going back to GNOME2 (it was simple), then abandoning it all after GNOME3 and KDE4 (hmmm a cashew) and going to OSX. All the Linux desktops I used in tandem with Windows XP and 7 to "keep my hand in" both markets.

I also dabbled with BeOS; it was really really fast. Upon examination in recent years, the development API for it was really simple too. Pity the wxWidgets wrapper for it was shut down.

It's amazing what having rubbish hardware will make you investigate.

How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is really great and USEFUL" instead of "this is really pretty", the joy of getting X to run, or learning a new Linux command whilst stuck in the CLI, getting VNC to work, doing X-window forwarding. I miss the lack of Internet, the fact that knowledge of systems came through hard work and patience, through reading and waiting for the next month's magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart.

They also look like someone tried to come up with their own ideas. Everything today is flat, sketchy, inexpressive and boring.

> How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is really great and USEFUL" instead of "this is really pretty", the joy of getting X to run, or learning a new Linux command whilst stuck in the CLI, getting VNC to work, doing X-window forwarding. I miss the lack of Internet, the fact that knowledge of systems came through hard work and patience, through reading and waiting for the next month's magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart.

I sometimes find myself thinking the same, but I guess it's the slow pace that allowed me to fixate that knowledge that I miss. We made a lot of these discoveries by piecing together various puzzles. It forced us to think what happens "underneath".

Nowadays, when everything is a "how to X" Google search away, you need a little discipline to keep thinking, instead of blindly following instructions.

Also amused to see the Jerkcity comic open in Jordan Hubbard's screenshot.

Your point is?