51–60 of 84 posts
Ah. Every time I look at the UI, I realize just how much the modern UI/UX degraded. We had clear colorful icons, text labels, scrollbars, clearly distinguishable checkboxes. And now we have UI that actively promotes "rebelliousness" and "being in the know".
We also had the hotdog theme.
Related: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251125-00/?p=11...
Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked. So simple, so easy. Those were the days.
Instead folks go with Electron crap.
Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked. So simple, so easy. Those were the days.
You can still have that experience with VB.NET, C#, Delphi, FreePascal, Gambas, Xojo and C++ Builder. Instead folks go with Electron crap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bellard (yes, him) already had a working VM of Windows 2000 in the browser around a decade ago, with no specific "support for all browsers" (whatever that means): https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
Sadly we can't all be Bellard
Chrome almost became the new IE and Google, despite it's motto, the new Microsoft. Ok, the desktop? Android rules the smartphone sales in the world, and its online services are used by millions, with far more metadata grabbing than w9x/wxp on its day and with the same propietary OSes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still have that experience with VB.NET, C#, Delphi, FreePascal, Gambas, Xojo and C++ Builder. Instead folks go with Electron crap.
TCL/Tk too, albeit being far less intuitive than Lazarus+FreePascal. Altough it has far less code, so it's a draw on difficulty. The average Joe would just spend time measuring the sizes of the frames and that's it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I beg to differ. I'm 55. Let's go back to say around 1994/5. I've just got a job as the first dedicated IT bod for a pie factory near Plymouth (Devon not MA)! Win 3.11 was pretty much everywhere and was almost reliable - patching wasn't really a thing then in the MS world. By then Pentium (586) was a thing but the majority of machines were 80486, 80386s were still useful. There were also the 386/486 SX/DX and DX2 and…
The world runs on Excel. It is the largest development environment by far and no fancy language/framework can come close to touch it. The reason is because it acts as the glue to get real life things done in everything from large governments, militaries, large corporations all the way down to the small bed and breakfast operation across the entire world. Normal people have gotten real processes built by just twiddlin…
That woudn't happen under BioPython/BioPer/Rl and a custom dedicated interface with no data mangling at all.
Poeple in the 90's joked about how MS turned the whole IT industry 20 years back. Now, literally, and not just IT.
And that's sad, because you have Turbo Pascal, Windows NT, the VB6 IDE against C/C++ libraries... good products on MS where data correctned was granted with low level libraries called from VB. For sure BLAS/Lapack would exist in the 90's as products for Visual C/C++.
Reusing MS Office for advanced tasks was the key of the shitty computing we were suffering on tons of places. Such as the idiots using Excel tables for Covid patients instead of having a proper SQL database. Even SQlite (IDK about the constraints, maybe it fits) could have been a better choice.
People said with Unix "Worse it's beter". He, nowadays even NDB 'databases' would grant you correctness on scientific data (it's plain text with tuples) that these rotten binary, propietary, office bound pseudo databases and spreadsheets. Or even AWK with CSV's/TSV's.
Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked. So simple, so easy. Those were the days.
I wrote a blog about this many years ago: https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/simple-windows-dial...