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Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

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Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#71

Post by thesnowdog »

qsera wrote: post #38
Megranium wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always amazed how Youtube can be so many different things for different people ... It's true that it used to be better a few years back, but people still upload great content even it it's harder to find nowadays. Also, music ... back in the 90ies, if you were drawn to the obscure side of music, you'd read about it, and could, at best, imagine what it was like, because your local record store didn't have it, the b…

Yea.. I have stayed up all night waiting for RHCP's "Otherside" to come on MTv to record it on tape.. Will kids today even understand something like that, is anyone captured by music like that these days?

I recall sitting around all afternoon to tape Layla off the radio, during a repeat countdown, after hearing it the day before for the first time. The DJ cut in during the fade out with "Indeed..." and forty years later I still can't listen to that song without hearing him at the end.

My musical discoveries exploded with the internet, I can't imagine what I would have missed without it.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#72

Post by qsera »

thesnowdog wrote: post #71
qsera wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea.. I have stayed up all night waiting for RHCP's "Otherside" to come on MTv to record it on tape.. Will kids today even understand something like that, is anyone captured by music like that these days?

I recall sitting around all afternoon to tape Layla off the radio, during a repeat countdown, after hearing it the day before for the first time. The DJ cut in during the fade out with "Indeed..." and forty years later I still can't listen to that song without hearing him at the end. My musical discoveries exploded with the internet, I can't imagine what I would have missed without it.

> I still can't listen to that song without hearing him at the end.

Something similar with me and "Another Day In Paradise". The first time I heard it was from a cassette my friend recorded from Dubai radio accidentally prefixed with an intro by the radio host..And that intro still comes to mind whenever I hear the song..

>My musical discoveries exploded with the internet

What, MTv didn't work for you for some reason?

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#73

Post by lysace »

HTML/HTTP/URL (1993-ish) was a massive win over Gopher.

It later turned bad with way too much complexity introduced in a symbiosis between Google and a relatively small group of prolific key web standards people.

It was a variation of embrace, extend, extinguish, but with a combination of open standards and sheer complexity.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#74

Post by jonjacky »

fsiefken wrote: post #66

I'd be ok with it if it's possible to use all the insights and software from after that, we'd just be constrained by the hardware - the Amiga 4000, Apple Mac Quadra 840av 128 MB or a Pentium 66 MHz or the 486 DX2-66 with 64 MB ram. On the Amiga4000 and Apple you could run their 'native' OS, or you could run a modern day NetBSD or a BeOS version (HaikuOS wouldn't run). On the Pentium-66, modern Freedos would run, Wind…

I'd be ok with it if it's possible to use all the insights and software from after that, we'd just be constrained by the hardware - the Amiga 4000, Apple Mac Quadra 840av 128 MB or a Pentium 66 MHz or the 486 DX2-66 with 64 MB ram.

Can't we achieve something like this now with microcontrollers like ESP32 or RP2040?

This project runs a ca. 1990 scientific workstation (not just a PC) on an RP2040:

https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#75

Post by mamcx »

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…

I instead think the mistake was internet. If I were a time lord, I found the way to cripple the internet tech (3-body problem style) so it fails to do better than 56k.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#76

Post by saulpw »

mamcx wrote: post #75
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…

I instead think the mistake was internet. If I were a time lord, I found the way to cripple the internet tech (3-body problem style) so it fails to do better than 56k.

I think it's the "always on" nature as opposed to the bandwidth. But maybe one begets the other.

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#77

Post by ip26 »

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…

Did you happen to be between 15-25 years old when ‘98 was released?

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#78

Post by medi8r »

netsharc wrote: post #67
qwertfisch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GSM spec is some years older, because you need time to built networks and phones based on it. In Germany GSM started 1992, and we already had a decent state-wide analog mobile phone network (mostly car phones because of the hardware requirements), called "C net" This was popular since the 80ies and only shutdown in 2000, when GSM was widely established with three private networks (and also cheaper then).

Gotta love the German creativity in naming. It's called "C Net" because that came after "B Net", which came after "A Net". While "A" apparently stood for "Autotelefon" (car phone). And when D-Net came, T-Mobile called their service D1, and Vodafone called theirs... D2.

They should have named it C++.Net

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#79

Post by muziq »

ChrisSD wrote: post #44
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 peopl…

I think it perhaps took off with NT4 in ‘96..

Re: Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

#80

Post by leptons »

weinzierl wrote: post #41
leptons wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might be surprised what old hardware was capable of...

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371

I'm sure there are more examples here

https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=MS-Dos&pa...

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