4 ms·

Yep, this is part of the reason why it drives me crazy when people say the '90s were the heyday of computing. Computers were awful back then.

nexuist 8y ago
I think they still have a point. It was the heyday of computing precisely because they were awful; there was always something to work on or improve. Fixing bugs in operating systems offered clear improvements to the livelihoods of thousands or millions. It's no longer that easy now. Most critical things don't suck that hard anymore, so it's hard to find a way to feel special, or feel like it's a special time to be a part of. Even in startup land most work done is "build this website" or "build this app" - what the software does could be cool and easy enough to get passionate about, but the hope that "we're going to use this code to revolutionize the entire world for the better" that was omnipresent in '90s hacker culture has pretty much been murdered by the sins of Facebook and others in Big Tech. Now it's "what can I do to make sure the stuff I work on hurts the least amount of people as possible?"
- knorker 8y ago
  On the flip side, while OpenSSH may be great and high quality now, and wasn't in the '90s, in the '90s people used telnet on the public Internet, and telnet worked.[1] IOW: It wasn't basic tech and great opportunity at the same time. Today you can work on immature things like OpenBSD's MPLS implementation and who knows, maybe in 20 years people will say that back in 2019 there were so many things that could be improved about that basic tech! (cue replies anti-labelswitching dweebs) [1] Not me, I used ssh since before OpenSSH.
  - icedchai 8y ago
    Telnet and rlogin were both very common. I remember installing ssh on my Slackware Linux box back in 1996. I had to build it from source... fun times!
beat 8y ago
I have a whole lightning talk about this, called "Why Software Sucks". The premise is that we are always dealing with the boundary between "barely works" and "doesn't work". Adding more stability, more features, etc just changes where that boundary is. After 25+ years in this industry, it sucks as bad as it ever did. Except now instead of a buggy OS, I'm dealing with, say, bugs in Openshift. Something like Openshift was almost unimaginable back when I started. Kinda sucks now. And the improvements are less than you might think. On that same job, we were managing a couple dozen servers in two different data centers, and 200+ client machines, all remotely, able to deploy different versions of the software to specific machines. It was like "cloud", except we did it all without so much as ssh. We had a configuration management database in Sybase, and rsh/perl scripts, along with SMIT commands (I miss SMIT).
jacobolus 8y ago
On the other hand, there are some things that are decidedly worse today than on some old machines. For example keyboard input latency on modern computers can be horrendous, and the physical keyboard hardware is utter garbage compared to what was available in the 80s. For a single-purpose writing machine (and as long as you don’t mind sitting at a desk), my parents’ Mac SE from 1989 running a version of MS Word from the early 1990s is IMO significantly more usable than a top-of-the-line 2019 computer running the latest version of MS Word. Given the amount of research and implementation effort/investment that has gone into improving computers over the past few decades, the state of user-facing software (including browsers and web apps) for the average person today is in my opinion shamefully bad.
- ajross 8y ago
  > my parents’ Mac SE from 1989 running a version of MS Word from the early 1990s is IMO significantly more usable than a top-of-the-line 2019 computer This is a bit spun. I can't tell you what to like, but it's easy to romanticize older machines and forget what life was like with a 512x342 monochrome 60 Hz CRT, no backbuffer, and a CPU that took multiple frames to do something as simple as scroll. I actually have a still-working Mac Plus I like to show off to friends. And yeah -- it was a great writing machine and in lots of ways current MS Office is a disaster of complexity. It was elegant in a historic way, but.. no, it's not "better" by the definition used by pretty much any working writer.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    My father continued to use it for the majority of his work until at least 2005, and the computer still boots and works just fine today. He had far more frequent problems with a succession of Windows laptops in the subsequent 15 years than from the 15 years of using the Mac SE. Having a small monochrome screen is not an insurmountable problem in practice for people used to doing most of their work by spreading physical paper around on the floor. Yes it could be better if it took advantage of 30 years of CPU, etc. improvements, but it’s nonetheless a fantastic tool. Your “working writers” probably also need their computers for web browsing or whatever. And probably waste a ton of time on computer-related or computer-aided bullshit.

nexuist 8y ago

I think they still have a point. It was the heyday of computing precisely because they were awful; there was always something to work on or improve. Fixing bugs in operating systems offered clear improvements to the livelihoods of thousands or millions. It's no longer that easy now. Most critical things don't suck that hard anymore, so it's hard to find a way to feel special, or feel like it's a special time to be a part of. Even in startup land most work done is "build this website" or "build this app" - what the software does could be cool and easy enough to get passionate about, but the hope that "we're going to use this code to revolutionize the entire world for the better" that was omnipresent in '90s hacker culture has pretty much been murdered by the sins of Facebook and others in Big Tech. Now it's "what can I do to make sure the stuff I work on hurts the least amount of people as possible?"

knorker 8y ago
On the flip side, while OpenSSH may be great and high quality now, and wasn't in the '90s, in the '90s people used telnet on the public Internet, and telnet worked.[1] IOW: It wasn't basic tech and great opportunity at the same time. Today you can work on immature things like OpenBSD's MPLS implementation and who knows, maybe in 20 years people will say that back in 2019 there were so many things that could be improved about that basic tech! (cue replies anti-labelswitching dweebs) [1] Not me, I used ssh since before OpenSSH.
- icedchai 8y ago
  Telnet and rlogin were both very common. I remember installing ssh on my Slackware Linux box back in 1996. I had to build it from source... fun times!

beat 8y ago

I have a whole lightning talk about this, called "Why Software Sucks". The premise is that we are always dealing with the boundary between "barely works" and "doesn't work". Adding more stability, more features, etc just changes where that boundary is. After 25+ years in this industry, it sucks as bad as it ever did. Except now instead of a buggy OS, I'm dealing with, say, bugs in Openshift. Something like Openshift was almost unimaginable back when I started. Kinda sucks now. And the improvements are less than you might think. On that same job, we were managing a couple dozen servers in two different data centers, and 200+ client machines, all remotely, able to deploy different versions of the software to specific machines. It was like "cloud", except we did it all without so much as ssh. We had a configuration management database in Sybase, and rsh/perl scripts, along with SMIT commands (I miss SMIT).

jacobolus 8y ago

On the other hand, there are some things that are decidedly worse today than on some old machines. For example keyboard input latency on modern computers can be horrendous, and the physical keyboard hardware is utter garbage compared to what was available in the 80s. For a single-purpose writing machine (and as long as you don’t mind sitting at a desk), my parents’ Mac SE from 1989 running a version of MS Word from the early 1990s is IMO significantly more usable than a top-of-the-line 2019 computer running the latest version of MS Word. Given the amount of research and implementation effort/investment that has gone into improving computers over the past few decades, the state of user-facing software (including browsers and web apps) for the average person today is in my opinion shamefully bad.

ajross 8y ago
> my parents’ Mac SE from 1989 running a version of MS Word from the early 1990s is IMO significantly more usable than a top-of-the-line 2019 computer This is a bit spun. I can't tell you what to like, but it's easy to romanticize older machines and forget what life was like with a 512x342 monochrome 60 Hz CRT, no backbuffer, and a CPU that took multiple frames to do something as simple as scroll. I actually have a still-working Mac Plus I like to show off to friends. And yeah -- it was a great writing machine and in lots of ways current MS Office is a disaster of complexity. It was elegant in a historic way, but.. no, it's not "better" by the definition used by pretty much any working writer.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  My father continued to use it for the majority of his work until at least 2005, and the computer still boots and works just fine today. He had far more frequent problems with a succession of Windows laptops in the subsequent 15 years than from the 15 years of using the Mac SE. Having a small monochrome screen is not an insurmountable problem in practice for people used to doing most of their work by spreading physical paper around on the floor. Yes it could be better if it took advantage of 30 years of CPU, etc. improvements, but it’s nonetheless a fantastic tool. Your “working writers” probably also need their computers for web browsing or whatever. And probably waste a ton of time on computer-related or computer-aided bullshit.