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Ah yes, the good old days: When cars had carburetors (and none of that fancy electronic stuff), maintenance was so much simpler. Cold weather sometimes got in
by kelvin0 10y ago
Ah yes, the good old days:
When cars had carburetors (and none of that fancy electronic stuff), maintenance was so much simpler. Cold weather sometimes got in the way of starting up, but once you were running, the joy!
Using punch cards and mainframes really forced the programmer to think his solution through and optimize the hell out of it. Once in a while your cards would not get entered properly, but in the end this made you a better programmer even if you are still in therapy for it.
When games had less than 16 colors, and all you needed were a few pixels on a cathod ray tube. Playing Pong, and Tennis and hockey all on the same machine! Sometimes you'd forget which one you where playing, but that was also part of the fun!
Progress entails transitions, and we are now transitioning. It is sometimes painful and ugly, but it's always necessary unless you stay static forever ...
- rawTruthHurts 10y agoYou can always compare a skateboard to a car if you want to make that kind of point, I guess.
- masswerk 10y agoThe only problem: We're downgrading functionality, while upscaling file sizes, bandwidths, processor load, the complexity of the tool chains involved, the costs of development, etc. Most of what we do was present for decades, and there's not so much change at all. E.g., there's not so much difference in requesting live data in a browser by the use of a hidden frame and reacting to its onload event (or using a mechanism, which became later known as padded JSON), like in the 1990s, and using a nifty AJAX library. (You're still requesting some data from a server to load it into the browser and eventually process it in an onload event handler in order to partially update the UI). The difference is really in the amount of processing and tooling involved in pulling this up. And then, there's the bitter irony of the history that started with the iPhone. Before, there had been smart phones, too, like the SE's ones, perfectly capable of displaying a subset of HTML4, and even a wide range of feature phones, being perfectly able to display a subset of XHTML. The selling point of the iPhone was its ability of displaying perfectly normal websites without any further modifications or restrictions applied. Now, file sizes are shooting up (because mobile?) and even your 4K screen is restricted most of the time to what may be done on a 5 inch touch display at the cost of high processing loads implied by an abundance of abstraction layers that are never put to a sensible use in the first place. So transition is nice and a good thing (like, if we had made use of multipart-http, as in HTTP1.1, but, yes, there was this MS bug regarding http chunks -- however, we may get now a second chance), but, nevertheless, we may question the direction of a particular transition from time to time.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoThe way I remember it, carburetors were finicky, needed tuning, and could fail in all sorts of interesting ways.