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Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

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Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#41

Post by weinzierl »

leptons wrote: post #40
weinzierl wrote: post #21

OP has a good point, but for me, I'd rather wish we'd skipped the 90s and picked up again much later. I like to think of the 8-bit era as an early bronze age of computing, lots of things went right and were done right. 16-bit, to me, are the dark ages. Lot's of confusion, not much good came out of it technologically and aesthetically. God, everything was ugly. Maybe all the trials and tribulations were necessary for…

There was plenty of amazing stuff going on with computing in the 90's. You just had to know where to look. Do you consider the 68000 CPU to be 16 or 32 bit, or both?

The 68000 was introduced in 1979, to me it is part of the 80s.

But you are making a good point. Maybe the distinction between 8/16/32/64-bit isn't really helpful. I loved the Amiga but I loathed all the XT/AT segmented memory bitplaned VGA 16-bit stuff. That to me is the deep dark ages.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#42

Post by happymellon »

josephg wrote: post #4

I've been half joking lately that if I wrote an OS, I'd call it Nostalgia OS. I'd aim for a UI reminiscent of windows 98 / windows 2000 / snow leopard. With HID guidelines and a rich, clear, cohesive set of UI widgets to build applications with. I think that was the peak computing user interface - at least as I experienced it. Of course, the kernel would be based on capabilities (probably SeL4). And applications woul…

> windows 98 / windows 2000 / snow leopard

I don't know if I would group those together. Windows 98/2k were visually similar, but OSX by that point was looking quite refined.

It had toned down the blue, but still had some visual flare.

95/98/2k had a very utility appearance. Just compare the recycle bins between each to see how much more effort went into OSX look and feel.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#44

Post by ChrisSD »

jmyeet wrote: post #2

I'm old enough to remember the 1990s. Many of us who do consider it the last good decade. Living was cheap. The previously ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had seemingly abated. This was before the d0t-com crash and obviously the War on Terror that has dominated the 21st century thus far. I have fond memories of the 486 era, which was really the early 1990s. I'm kinda surprised the PC component of this isn…

> It does mention Windows NT but honestly nobody really cared about that until NT 3.0/3.5 and it soon thereafter became Windows XP and laid the foundation for modern Windows.

Fun fact: NT 3.1 was the first version of NT, released in 1993. It was versioned like that to match Windows 3.1 which had been released the previous year.

And NT really took off with Windows 2000. Not just business people but more ordinary people were using it as a more stable alternative to Windows 95/98 (albeit lacking some compatibility, especially with games).

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#45

Post by hypercube33 »

mrwh wrote: post #6

I don't think I was ever happier as a programmer than I was in the early 90s, well before university, with no thought of the internet, writing games on my Amiga. Incidentally, I recently replayed Loom, from a bit before that era. It's still a lovely, wonderful game! Such a shame the fan-made sequel (Forge) seems to have died.

I had two faster (Pentium 3) machines but firing up my dad's old Pentium 90 running redhat that I installed to use KDE to write C was just a beautiful feeling and really got me coding for a few years.

Even games were at least partially open (quake) or easily moddable (command and conquer, tribes, etc.) so I went down that rabbit hole soon after.

Also man I really miss BeOS.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#46

Post by voidUpdate »

valorzard wrote: post #28

Time lords can’t do anything, they’re all dead (twice now, thanks RTD) Maybe the doctor could take you back there with a TARDIS, but time paradoxes and fixed points in time and all that

Given how many times they've been gone forever, never to come back, and then come back again, I wouldn't count on them being dead for long

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#47

Post by api »

What this is really talking about is that we abandoned well engineered thought out platforms for piles of hacks, and superior clean languages for inferior but popular ones.

The problem with a lot of those beautiful systems is that they were neither free nor easy to use. The things that won were either or both of these.

For hardware the things that won, like the PC platform, had scale, and therefore won on price performance. A lot of the hardware mentioned here was priced for enterprise. Platforms that were only available in those price brackets and never fell in price either died or stayed extremely niche (s390x).

A second problem with the nice software is that a lot of it was not ported to the cheap hardware.

For software, free isn’t just about money. It’s also about virality. A free OS or language implementation can just be copied. You don’t have to ask permission.

The only non-free software that won was easy to use. Free is usually still unable to achieve that. People will pay for ease of use. The nice well engineered stuff, though, was usually still arcane.

I think “worse is better” can be explained by these things. Worse is not better for some non obvious systemic or evolutionary theoretic reason. Worse is cheaper, or free, and therefore has scale and can spread virally.

Linux was free. The web was free. C compilers were free and Java and JS were free. Windows and macOS and later phones were easy to use and still cheaper than those enterprise grade things.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#48

Post by hypercube33 »

Megranium wrote: post #39

I honestly don't share the nostalgia. I enjoy having a computer that allows me to create all kinds of things that weren't possible in 1993 ... mash together all kinds of audio, video, text ... put it in a backpack, bring it somewhere, perform on stage, with an 800$ laptop. Amazing. I'm one of those "Encarta kids" who dug through Encarta for nights on end while the parents were out, and still spend slow Sundays readin…

I feel like you missed out on the best part of Napster - finding someone's stash of music you like surrounded by things you've never heard of and then exploring it. My memory swears you could leave someone a message but that's a lifetime ago, but I know I connected with a few people who helped me absolutely get into metal music and that's changed my life for the good forever.

Other than that you'd go to a LAN party and find someone's file share of goodies, find again the things you were into and now you had a new friend who probably liked things you never knew of and now you two are sharing new things to each other on top of that.

It was really an age of connecting people and exploring the world for me, even as a young kid.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#49

Post by reacweb »

Yes, before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

At that time, there was almost no spam because we could report them to abuse@domain...

There was no firewall in front of our campus and we were using rlogin to connect outside. I used export DISPLAY from Brest to Paris (to use xdvi that was not installed locally).

IMO, the security (ssh and killing rlogin) is the main change that is a really useful progress.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#50

Post by birdsongs »

vunderba wrote: post #14

Pre-wikipedia days means you would likely have found me hunched over a 14" VGA monitor reading articles about giant devil rays and mansa musa in Microsoft Encarta as a kid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta

I adored Encarta. My aunt had the multi-CD set, I still vividly remember the animated landing page, clicking on cool pictures to navigate. Having to switch to CD#2 because the article you wanted wasn't on there.

It actually felt magical, and I totally credit it with my fascination with STEM and science, I would spend hours browsing around.

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