Like when the 'off' button meant 'off'? Yeah, I do.
I miss buttons in general.
Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
21–30 of 149 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#22i really do, i mainly miss: * people not being able to contact me 24/7 * not knowing what is going on in the world all the time (this i miss the most) * things being local * way less crap people used to own
people not being able to contact me 24/7
You can still have that! I have it. Literally cannot remember the last time I answered the phone :)
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#23I miss 90s complexity!
Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha were still alive. Assembly was a thing.
Mobile telephones for mortals were a marvel and technological breakthrough that could let you communicate everywhere.
3D graphics could run in software, and Abrash' Black Book was a black book, and even more, wizards had managed to capture things in hardware for the PC with some sort of voodoo.
Now we have 1.5 dominant boring architecture where performance is bumped by "Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11" and no one cares because everything is ecmascript anyway, mobile telephones, or "telephones", are devices that mildly entertain you as you wait for death, and graphics are a matter of dumping the right shaders through the right libraries.
The future just looked a little more interesting. The 90s for me is where the great tragedy of simplification began.
The present is still pretty okay though, I just would have liked it a little "rougher" computing wise :)
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#24Recently I built a tube stereo amplifier kit and speakers. Bought an old fashioned CD player for it. Just put in a CD and push play. No screwing around with apps, streaming, etc.
As a teenager in the late 80’s, you knew where your friends were on the weekends, but we didn’t have cell phones. You could find a party in a remote part of the county, but no one had a GPS.
Computing was also fun, in the days of BBS and pre-WWW Internet.
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#25In 1981, Electric Light Orchestra wrote about remembering the good old 1980's.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBiPY8wDT0
Here's the lyrics:
Remember the good old 1980's
When things were so uncomplicated
I wish I could go back there again
And everything could be the same
https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon&oq...
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#26You mean when computers ran at MHz speed as opposed to GHz?
It took a lot more work to get a decent user experience.
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#27simplicity of what? getting any kind of information was ecruciatingly hard until broadband became available. There were wars, politics, same or worse than today's (yugoslav wars, gulf wars, palestine). You can have a roadtrip nowadays easily (simplicity), try that in the 90s. I think you have it backwards, today is simpler. I mean just catching up with the music genres of the 90s was an arduous task!
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#28i really do, i mainly miss: * people not being able to contact me 24/7 * not knowing what is going on in the world all the time (this i miss the most) * things being local * way less crap people used to own
people not being able to contact me 24/7 You can still have that! I have it. Literally cannot remember the last time I answered the phone :)
Yeah, that's at least partially a social problem or how you relate to people and tech, not a tech problem per se. You have to manage your relationships to both people and tech.
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#29Like when the 'off' button meant 'off'? Yeah, I do.
The switch that completely isolated power from your pc. Luckily that still exists at the wall .... for now. Phones are another story.
Not if your PC is a laptop, and has a battery. You can tell it to go to sleep, and, sometime later, Windows 10 will wake it up and sneak up an update on you (with a complimentary restart included).
Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
#30Yes. The thing I miss the most is the sense that I, and everyone around me, used to be mentally in the same place they were physically. Obviously people were distracted or preoccupied from time to time, perhaps they had a sick far away relative, say, that dominated their thoughts. But those kind of situations were the exceptions. Now literally every single person you interact with is mentally in the middle of several…
Truth. In the 90's, if you went to a party and sat in a corner reading a book, it was usually....odd. The idea was that you were supposed to at least try to be interacting with others. Some of us were geeks, some of us found social interaction difficult, but since there wasn't a real substitute for it, we had to stick it out and learn how to be with people. And then we got the benefits of being with people. Now there…
I am sure there were as many people who did not like interacting with others as there are today, it's just because now its OK to be like that, you see them more often, back in the days they were just staying home because they felt uncomfortable by judgements of others.