Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

Development was more approachable for the newcomer, because there were fewer choices and tooling was less mature. Obviously professionals are better off now, but as a newbie in the 90s it was pretty amazing to develop a website on Notepad and be one of the only people you knew who had a web presence. That and all the BASIC platforms (QBASIC, Commodore, etc) allowed you to build simple text-based games at a time when text-based games weren't uncommon. It felt like with just a little bit of practice you could run with the pros; not necessarily true, but it was really encouraging.

I feel pity for people entering development now. The industry must seem like this colossal, endlessly complex, ever-changing mess filled with experts who know 1000x more than you ever will. There's an overwhelming amount of information, and there's so many partially overlapping disciplines that it's easy to feel lost.

At least people learned the importance of giving good descriptions the first time in real life.

Too much these days feels like people just leave a message prompt and expect you to return contact and fill in all of their blanks.

E.g. my telephone messages will specify who I am, why I’m calling, what I’m looking for, when to contact me and my phone number (always twice!).

Dunno if others were any better in the past, or if I’m bitter about forums that cater to less advanced users that chronically leave out critical details.

Probably for the reasons you mentioned, I have a tradition of playing SimCity2000 every time I’m on a flight, and never anytime else.

It’ll be the same experience, every time, and it’ll never break.

My grandpa would agree, I think. DOS is way easier to teach by rote, and is a much more consistent experience than a modern operating system.

Yes. This is something I have given a lot of thought to. I mean, A LOT.

Before about, 1996-- (I'm estimating)-- before network connectivity was the norm-- I understood how every processor in every system I dealt with worked. Two things happened in the mid to late 90s.

First-- an explosion of silicon. The days of understanding how the system worked, in its entirety, were over. I had a copy of "80386 systems designers guide", and I can't remember the name- but the Michael Abrash's guide to VGA video cards and a PC Interrupts were all that were needed to master computer architecture. If you were super fancy you understood the Pentium math extensions (whose names I cannot recall), that let you do a crossbar in a few cycles, and you understood how common chips like the 16550 worked, which is an addendum to PC Interrupts if I recall.

Second, and this is the key thing, technology started working AGAINST us. As complexity exploded, so did network connectivity. We had this era in which Operating Systems complexity exploded (win95), silicon complexity exploded, and connectivity exploded. The thing about connectivity is this-- that's when our computers went from isolated things to these things that are always online-- they started working against us. They could now talk to other computers, other people, and that changed computing fundamentally.

Computers went from these things that were our helpmates to our masters. This is what I lament the most. I don't miss bit-banging, assembly programming (well, a little). I fudging love Ruby/Python, as opposed to C++ being considered "High Level." I love that I can buy a computer for 35$ (RPI) that is fantastic. RPi's are so cheap I employ half a dozen just to run my 3d printers (yes I have a problem). But I do so much not miss being scared of my computer. Miss being scared of the ne5work. I miss the sense of wonder at what a computer could be or do. You have to understand technology as it exists now, is beyond my wildest dreams. I watched Star Trek TNG as a child and the devices we have now, legitimately have exceeded my wildest dreams. The simplest cell phone now has as much computational power as every computer combined at the time I graduated high school.

But, I do miss simplicity. So much so, I've been considering writing an NES or Sega game; I'm precisely 40 years old, and I've finally come to understand that art and constraints are intimately connected. That they press on each other, and neither is possible without each other.

I have so few restraints on modern systems that I... am constrained. I miss the constraints of my earlier years that were, in fact, my freedom. I miss software that shipped and worked on the first day. I, like everyone, miss my childhood. Because the universe is an explosion of complexity-- and when we look back, we will always feel like things were simpler-- because they god damned actually were.