91–100 of 214 posts
The Zip drive in the picture feels slightly anachronistic though. Technically it isn’t, having been release a few months before Windows 95, but still.
Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers. It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers. It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option.. You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
Every generation has its hype cycle; it's nothing new.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly was the difference between PC speakers and MIDI? Why do we no longer need a MIDI device today to play the “correct” sound?
The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice. There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file as it's just note and tempo data. But many people probably associate them with the OPL2 synthesizer chip on AdLib and early SoundBlaster cards. [1] Now that we have high fidelity digital sound output on even the cheapest computers/devices, at least 44 kHz, at least two channels, and at least 16 bits per sa…
I am reminded of Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, which let the PC speaker output something beyond just bleeps and bloops.
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Canyon.mid on my windows computer is.
It sounds noticeably different in Windows Media Player. The video is probably using a Yamaha OPL chip, as found in Sound Blaster cards.
And any OPL is almost certainly emulated, not an actual chip.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers. It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
Objectively music was less massproduced, equal low quality slop in earlier years.