17 ms·

Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing

137 points by panic 6y ago

mikl 6y ago
Author seems to think PC users like to run multiple OSes on their machine. I think that might just be him, regular people have enough to learn in mastering a single OS, no need to add more. Also, macOS still has a nice GUI to set startup disk, and most of the other features he shows old macOS having. And the rest of this multi-OS pipe-dream, who wants any of this?
- wyldfire 6y ago
  Regular people don't know what an OS is.
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
    That may seem like an exaggeration but in my experience it's literally true. I tried to explain to my wife what "Linux" was but had to explain what "Operating System" is first, and I don't think I ever made much of an inroad on either. It's just not interesting or relevant to her life at all. My in-laws, foggedaboutit.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >It's just not interesting or relevant to her life at all. This is the key point I think a lot of tech people don't get. My dad's smart. He worked in pharma for many years and knows tons about a lot of the science (and business) related to that. He just never had any interest in learning about things like file systems and so forth. A tablet for him was my best gift to myself ever. (And he now just uses a large smartphone. He doesn't use the vast majority of its capabilities because he's just not interested in them; he uses what's of interest to him.)
      - wyldfire 6y ago
        > He just never had any interest in learning about things like file systems and so forth. Most people (especially today in 2020) don't know what a file is. And that's okay, or great even. A filesystem is a leap yet beyond that. Apple takes great pains to hide the filesystem from the user in iOS. And that was probably a really, really good move. They have the freedom to change how the internals of devices use files and may have gotten some security benefit as well. Mobile computing provided a great opportunity to enable some cool tech that breaks backwards compatibility. Like signed bootloaders, indexed-database-as-filesystem, permissions/capabilities. All of these were available on desktop OSs but haven't found a wide audience. Or hadn't, until much more recently. Sorry- bit of a tangent there. Point being: way back when, in order to be productive with a computer you had to know more about its design. But today, many things "just work" without need to understand how/why.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      My girlfriend is incredibly intelligent, but doesn't care much for computers or programming the way I do and just buys Apple stuff for its "just works" factor. That said, I was having trouble getting sound working on a Linux laptop one day, and it turned out to be because my user didn't belong to the "audio" group and so didn't have permission to play sound. I explained this to her, and she told me she understood why that would make sense, and why someone would want to design a system to work that way, even though it is not a system she, personally, would use. Aaaand this is why she is my girlfriend. :) Not to take away from your wife, I'm sure she's lovely. I'm just glad to be with someone who's both smart and empathetic enough to understand why I do what I do, and why I like the weird computer shit I like. (My girlfriend on the Amiga 500 I bought: "I like this. Why didn't this take over?")
    - smichel17 6y ago
      Not yet. "I used to be dismissive about tech issues; I started caring when I realized that tech is where the power struggles of this era will take place." -friend of mine I love sharing this quote because it is so prescient. Sleep too long, and we may wake in chains.
  - pmarreck 6y ago
    And if you try to argue the merits of one OS over another having had much experience with both, they will argue back with you even though 99.9999% of their experience is with one OS
  - bitwize 6y ago
    They have to be taught, and normies learn about things like this the way they learn about much of the world: through marketing. If the enormous hypetrain behind Windows 95 did one thing, it was to make "operating system" a household term -- because in order to care about Windows 95, people had to care about operating systems.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  "Oh, I run my games on GameOS because it doesn't take a bunch of resources for GUI animations and multitasking, but I use PrettyOS for just regular work. I've got high hopes for VROS, they say I can use a weaker system with my Vive than on Windows." People don't do it now because it's ridiculously difficult to do for limited utility.
  - visarga 6y ago
    Many regular people have game console, laptop and phone. Three different devices, three OSes.
    - bsanr2 6y ago
      What if you want to use the same form factor, same system, same files, you just want the system to allocate resources differently? That's what this hypothetical would be.
jart 6y ago
> Make each application one file. [...] Make the operating system one file. Yes and yes! That's actually exactly what I've been working on with Actually Portable Executable. https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/ape.html https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/ape.html > How could we simplify: Write a GUI bootloader Nooo. There's the problem. GUIs have always been a shitshow w.r.t. compatibility. I've pretty much come to the conclusion at this point that, if we want simple, we have to give up on wanting it with GUIs. Vendors just aren't going to ever agree. There's too much vision and financial incentive to compete. However terminals, are boring, and operating systems no longer have any reason to engineer incompatibilities. As of last year, they've all pretty much been like, yeah, we'll implement vt100 because we don't care anymore. Even Windows CMD prompt! It's great. This new consensus is going to make so much toil go away. For example, here's an app I wrote a few months ago. It's a single file TUI application. The binary runs on all the different operating systems and looks exactly the same. Truly build-once run-anywhere. It literally looks the same on Linux as it does in Windows command prompt and Mac too etc. It doesn't have any dependencies. It's about 200kb. https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/blinkenlights/index.html https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/blinkenlights/index.h... I've been using it lately testing tool, because I want these single file programs to boot from BIOS on bare metal too. I've got it working for stdio so far. So once I add a virtio ethernet driver it'll be golden. Especially for cloud deploys. Every program you compile is its own operating system which runs on all the other ones too. I call it the Cosmopolitan C Library (NOTE: this page is work in progress!) https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/cosmopolitan/index.html https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/cosmopolitan/index.ht...
- causality0 6y ago
  For me that would be exactly opposite of the direction I want things to go. I want more files and more editability. I want to be able to track down the audio file for that godawfully loud "CLANG!" sound Google Assistant makes and tear it out by the roots, then print it out and burn it for good measure.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    The NeXTSTEP/Mac solution is to make the GUI treat application bundles as a single unit, while behind the scenes they're a transparent, self-describing directory hierarchy.
raldi 6y ago
We got an IBM PC XT in 1984. I disagree 180° with every claim about the past this article makes. Computers of today, and particularly mobile devices, are infinitely simpler and easier.
- bestham 6y ago
  But the IBM PC XT and Macintosh of 1984 were orthogonal to each other already in the year of 1984. You argument would stand if the Macintosh and the XT were on par in 1984, but whey were not.
  - raldi 6y ago
    Things weren't much better on Macs; it's just that on DOS, when things weren't working you would type a bunch of different command line options and then give up, whereas on a Mac you would just give up. I'm having 90's flashbacks to debugging nonworking printers and my girlfriend asking why, after many months since the installation, "is Netscape showing up as a hard drive"? And then there's "no, you just closed all the windows; you didn't close the app"
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I was a DOS user at the time the Mac first came out and there were a few Macs around my grad school. My recollection is similar to yours. The fix on DOS might be something arcane related to config.sys files or whatever but if you banged at it long enough you could often (though certainly not always) get something to work eventually. Macs were more likely to just work out of the box. But if it didn't, you pretty much gave up because there was much less to twiddle with.
fancyfredbot 6y ago
I remember having to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys files in a text editor to install a mouse driver. I also remember having to set IRQs using actual jumpers on my soundcard. I actually loved all of that but it wasn't really easy.
- raldi 6y ago
  Not only did you have to worry about IRQ conflicts, some hardware didn't work well (or at all) at some of the offered IRQs. And there was no Google to help you.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Indeed. I remember cycling to the local library, searching the old serial terminals for a particular book that could explain an issue I was having, then order it to be sent to my local branch (as they invariably didn't have it) so I could pick it up a few days later. Just to solve a problem (usually pretty complex ones involving things like datasheets or programming manuals but still...). The internet has provided us a way to handle much more complex issues in much less time just by offering immediate access to shared knowledge. That alone makes things much easier these days than back then. But I feel it makes us dumber as well in a sense. Before the internet you couldn't start a major project without knowing all about it before you started. Now often we will just start, and google any problems on the way, often realising only later on that the initial approach was poorly chosen.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    I can still remember with horror a Windows NT networking class that needed every student machine to have three ISA Ethernet cards manually configured with non-conflicting settings. Can you have that ready by tomorrow, they asked after lunch...
    - pmarreck 6y ago
      wait why THREE?
blakesterz 6y ago
I feel like the third sentence of this post should've been the title: "Can we make a friendly Libre Desktop operating system with focus on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability?" I like that idea. Having lived through the 80s and 90s personal computing era, I can say there was very little that was easy. Especially the 80s. Everything was also super expensive. Things crashed all the time, I can remember hitting Save and having a program crash and losing work. Because I saved, so I wouldn't lose work. It took so much work to do anything back then. I guess it's easy to forget how much everything sucked. I don't disagree with the central idea here though. I do think something that focuses on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability is a nice idea. Though I can't imagine many people agree.
- fabrice_d 6y ago
  I think Elementary (https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/) is aiming at being that kind of OS. And it's really good!
  - dghlsakjg 6y ago
    I tried out running elementary in a vm on my mac. It was actually a snappy responsive system even though it was inside a VM. Everything about that is amazing
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    That's just a fork of Ubuntu LTS right? There are many many lightweight Linux distros that are probably much smaller.
    - fabrice_d 6y ago
      No, it's not just a Ubuntu fork. Many apps are elementary specific, written in Vala iirc.
      - 7thaccount 6y ago
        So a commercial Ubuntu fork with some custom apps, got it. Still hardly groundbreaking though right? I'm thinking more of something like HaikuOS if you want something completely out there.
based2 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit
- pcurve 6y ago
  ah, I would spend hours colorizing icons using resedit 2.1.3. Instead, I should've been out playing balls. lol. re: the article, as much as I have a lot of fond memories of System 7, I don't think today's modern OS seem that bad. MS has been trying to abstract away legacy complexity bit by bit, it's very difficult to just throw everything away, the worst one being flaky file sharing functions. But over time, I'm sure we'll get to better place.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
I think this guy has a too-rosy view of the 80s and 90s. Probably used only Macs as most of his examples are about Mac. By the way, a Mac still lets you select a boot drive in the exact same way. And current Macs still remember the positioning of icons and on a Mac you can still run apps from anywhere (unless the developer didn't follow Apple's standards but that's not Apple's fault). If you take his comments purely within the Mac field of view which he seems to do, some of these statements are simply false. And the unrestricted, non-password users? Well yeah it would be nice but the cold dark world of the internet has caught up with that. Good luck with your botnets. I don't think he's ever edited config.sys and autoexec.bat files, struggled with setting nonconflicting IRQs with jumpers and set up XMS/EMS high-memory drivers, just to have enough to load all the TSRs you needed and have enough real memory available available to run a program. Or used Word Perfect which required a 'cheat sheet' with all the different function key combos. Most programs required classroom training for all non-geek people to use them. I loved that time too. But it was definitely not easier than it is now. By the way, someone looking for this simpler experience can find it in the mobile OSes. An iPad already provides most of these things while being secure (but at the expense of Apple deciding what you can and can't do with your device). A lot of people already use a mobile or tablet as their sole computing device.
- foobarian 6y ago
  1) Turn on computer. 2) 500ms go by 3) Computer prints "READY" and shows a blinking cursor. At this point you can start typing code. That is what I miss about 80s computing.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    4) Spend 10 minutes saving your carefully written code to tape. 5) Scream at the tape the next day because it stretched a bit and the computer now won't read it back, or your little sister recorded the spice girls over it :P I did love that time too though! But it did have its drawbacks. But really, this experience is not far away if you're looking for it. A raspberry pi kinda offers that. Maybe not the 500ms, but it boots in seconds to a CLI and it's cheap enough to just leave running. Windows 10 is also really fast at booting (basically because it secretly just hibernates its kernel but it's a smart and useful trick).
NuSkooler 6y ago
Listen, I love retro computing. And sure, the systems were much simpler. Systems get more complex over time. I wouldn't be typing in this edit field in a web browser within a window in a multitasking GUI OS if not. With that said, things certainly were not easier. Plug in a device now days and viola it works! Transfer a archive from Linux -> OS X -> Windows and you can view it (and even using the same multi-platform apps) across the board. ...the list goes on forever. Can things be easier? Sure? Simplicity? Yes! Is it all rainbows and unicorns? Nah (as people have pointed out already you lose control). Many systems exist for things like single file applications. Of course no one can agree on what that should look like it seems. AppImages, .apks (which are just Zip files), static binaries, containerized applications, etc. OS X has had .app's for a long time which are just a folder of files (and the common way to transfer that is a mountable image or archive). People have tried many times to come up with embedded icons in ELF. Why some Linux users push back is still beyond me. Yes we know we need multiple formats and resolutions. OK, support that. .desktop files are nice, but that shouldn't be something I have to mess around with generally. Most systems still don't have a nice way to even create these files (which let's be honest: are just the Windows equivalent to a .lnk desktop shortcut). Oof I could go on forever here. I think I'll stop.
zepto 6y ago
It’s not obvious how booting into different operating systems frequently simplifies things.
christophilus 6y ago
Weird. Today, I plug in a computer and it works. I install an OS and it works. It detects all of my hardware and gets online right away. My computer hasn’t randomly crashed in years. When I save my work, I don’t even consider the possibility that the save might fail and I’ll lose all of my changes. When I wonder how to do something, I can find the answer in seconds by typing plain English into one of several powerful web browsers. I also have a super computer in my pocket. Also, I have git which is so vastly better than anything I had in the 90s. We seem to have two very different experiences of past technology. One last thing. I installed Elementary OS on an old computer recently, and every app opened instantly. As in, I clicked it, and it was just there. No perceptible delay. I’m not entirely sure how they do it, but it seems they’re close to the goal in that department.
- AnHonestComment 6y ago
  I had Windows hard crash using Google Chrome on Hulu. I had Windows reset itself in the middle of a long-running calculation overnight, because obviously 100% CPU usage and programs that refuse to quit is a signal it’s safe to power cycle the computer. I routinely have to fight my devices to do what I say, because they re-interpreted valid words into other ones. I think modern tech reliability is as overstated as historic rosiness — this turd is polished, but it’s not more functional.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Windows is absolutely more stable now than it was in the 90s. Not even comparable.
    - keyle 6y ago
      Hmm Windows NT was a rock.
      - accountofme 6y ago
        My fav OS was Win2k ... Ahhh memories
lupinglade 6y ago
So true. I’d love to have a modern macOS that is as streamlined and well thought out as OS 8/9 or a modern NeXTSTEP. Instead we have bloated, buggy, fugly operating systems that restrict what you can do more and more with every new version. What a shame.
vidanay 6y ago
Why don't we bring back pages of 6pt font hex codes from the back of Byte magazine too?
- musicale 6y ago
  I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I think I'm all for it! :D Ancient computer magazines seem like magical treasure troves. I recently linked to an issue of Creative Computing which included the source listing for the Oregon Trail game that you could type in and run, as well as an article describing the game and a transcript of someone playing (and actually winning, haha.) I'd say that's pretty interesting and educational because the code has to go through your brain and out your fingers, and then you have to debug it afterward. It cracks the black box open and shows you the inside components inside; even if you might not fully understand them immediately you can see what they are made of and how they work at a micro level. And limited system memory, page count, and and finger endurance seem to have kept source listings reasonably short and manageable, while still enabling interesting and non-trivial applications. There may also be more incentive to explore both the gameplay and its implementation in some detail since you put so much effort into it, rather than just clicking on the next opaque binary download. That being said... github is also a magical treasure trove, but usually without the friendly magazine articles explaining the software, so the onramp is steeper even if you don't have to type the code in yourself. I'd like to see a github index of short-form, relatively self-contained software of this sort. Ideally with accompanying articles. ;-) I'd also like to see more modern magazines like the MagPi.
bnkamalesh 6y ago
Modern day IDEs alone are worth it for me!
temporallobe 6y ago
The “good old days” of simplicity OP talks about can be experienced by using a tablet. Turn on, use, turn off. It’s sufficient for lots of everyday computing tasks and can even be paired with a keyboard and mouse. Everything “just works” for the most part and it’s a very simplified version of the typical desktop experience.
- machinelabo 6y ago
  Except when you want to type something - which is pretty much every 30 seconds or so; you have to put the iPad down on a surface, then type it with your fingers and off you go. If I am using a pencil, it is annoying as hell to type with one hand. iPad is only great for taking notes + consuming long form content. Browsing the internet requires keyboard input.
  - lolinder 6y ago
    The amount of keyboard input required for browsing can be easily filled in by voice dictation. Or a lousy on screen keyboard. Creating long form content absolutely requires a keyboard, but the parent even mentions that as part of the "it just works" of a tablet.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I sort of agree with the parent. I get into serious browsing/searching/etc. and I usually just end up grabbing a laptop. I can do it on my tablet but it just seems like too much work. Of course, that may reflect habits and if I were to only have a tablet I'm sure I could make it work. My dad certainly has no trouble ordering from Amazon all the time just using his phone.
    - jasonjayr 6y ago
      Voice dictation .... if you are comfortable with sending all your input to a random 3rd party server. That's how the 2 major providers work nowadays unfortunately. We had mediocre on-device voice dictation when Pentiums + 486's were all the rage; (ie. Dragon Naturally Speaking 1.0 in 1997) why can't we get on-device voice dictation on these ARM devices at similar or slightly better quality, since these SoC's are 10x what we could do in the 90s?
hlehmann 6y ago
The author of this article obviously never actually tried to use a computer in the 80's. Don't forget to edit your autoexec.bat file before you try to play that video game! Internet? Shiiiat, dial up your local BBS and try to download some files before your family starts complaining that they can't use the phone. Also, don't forget to release the Turbo button so that your game doesn't run at twice normal speed. Want to install that new version of WordPerfect? That'll be twenty floppy disks that have to be inserted in the proper sequence, and don't you dare get them out of order. Sheesh,... wankers.
ilaksh 6y ago
Interesting. I hope he realizes he can also just run that old system in an emulator and have things exactly the way they were.
phkahler 6y ago
>> Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. Because in the 80s things would boot to a DOS prompt or a basic interpreter and you had to know some commands to type to get anything to happen. Today they boot to GUI with useful applications to run. Well, except for Windows.
grawprog 6y ago
I'm not sure what dreamland the author lived in. Computers today are relatively about the same hassle wise as they've always been. The exact problems may have changed, but I find myself experiencing roughly the same amount of problems with computers as I always have which is basically: Enough that I always realize they're there and sometimes they annoy me but overall, having a computer and having access to all the awesome things computers can do is worth the hassle.
tracerbulletx 6y ago
This is not how I remember computing in the 80s and 90s.
musicale 6y ago
I tend to agree with this assessment. As the author demonstrates, classic Macintosh computers are/were much simpler than modern Macs and also easier to use. They typically also sported a tiny black and white display (vs. 27" or larger 5K or 4K full/wide color and HDR displays), extremely primitive multimedia capabilities (Macromedia director vs. the web, iMovie, Unity...), much slower storage (slow floppy disks and hard drives vs. modern flash storage), and was more likely to crash or freeze due to lack of memory protection and preemptive multitasking (though it didn't have the problem of breaking when you lose internet connectivity like modern macOS.) Modern IP networking is powerful and connects you to the world, but AppleTalk was largely plug-and-play and had nice dynamic resource discovery (which influenced the design of Bonjour/mDNS.) Note classic Macs could be connected to the IP internet, but they lacked web browsers until ~1992. ;-) As far as Apple is concerned, I think iOS may be the inheritor of much of the simplicity of the classic Macintosh: one app at a time, simplified multitasking, hood welded shut with minimal user-serviceable components inside. But an iPhone also does much more than a typical Macintosh of the 1980s or early 1990s, notably full wireless, mobile internet access with modern web support, streaming video, television, and music, wireless/mobile voice and video calls, multimedia messaging and email, full speech recognition and automatic dictation, Siri/digital assistant, full voice control of the device, automatic language translation, accelerated 3D graphics with augmented reality support, automatic computational photography, high-resolution, color digital painting and photo editing with dozens of layers, video editing, CD-quality sampling, music synthesis, and multitrack recording, millions of downloadable apps, etc.. And it runs all day on batteries and fits in your pocket.
- thewebcount 6y ago
  > (Macromedia director vs. the web, iMovie, Unity...) For the record, iMovie originally ran on Classic macOS 8 in 1999.
  - musicale 6y ago
    You are indeed correct, but 1999 is more "late 90s" and by that point the Macintosh (and Mac OS) had become vastly more powerful, with the PowerPC G3/G4, color graphics, GPUs, etc., not to mention advances in the web platform. Note I said "Classic Macs" (think compact Macintosh models with 68000 processors) rather than classic Mac OS. By 1999 the shift to OS X was also underway, with Mac OS X Server 1.0 released that year.
deeg 6y ago
These kinds of articles come up occasionally about how good things were back on the day but I think it's largely due to forgetting all the problems, like: - BSOD - Running out of memory and trying to shift stuff to high mem. - Software would come with 20 install floppies. Good luck if it failed on #18. - Running out of ports for external devices. - Plug 'n Play that didn't play. - Modems over analog telephony. There's a long list.
- coliveira 6y ago
  It is true that things were not perfect in the 80s, but the author has a point. The point is that software designers had the goal of making things at least seem easier and consistent for users. That is the reason for standardized interfaces and APIs. Nowadays, computing seems to have become a free for all, where developers don't care (or have lost the hope of) presenting software in a way that is easy to use. Users are supposed to magically "figure out" how things work, and if they don't is because they're "stupid". Software users nowadays are supposed to put up with whatever crappy interface is was designed last week, just for the sake of "refreshing the UI" (see the disastrous UI updates promoted by Google and FB).
  - kolinko 6y ago
    Well, the point of making users "figure it out" is so that you don't need a 100-page manual, or a training session to use the software. As for the fact that interfaces change - I noticed that it's an issue mostly with Windows&Linux. MacOS has a high consistency of interfaces across the apps - might be due to a HIG that Apple publishes?
- Firehawke 6y ago
  I could write a book on the headaches of getting certain hardware to actually go to an IRQ and/or address that won't conflict with another device. That hell went from MS-DOS all the way into Windows 98 and only went away once Windows 2000/XP made PnP actually work reliably.
- fragsworth 6y ago
  > Plug 'n Play that didn't play We called it "Plug 'n Pray".
known 6y ago
I think we have a default for all options in Linux platform
4778468d 6y ago
OS X is an incredible operating system, vastly more powerful than anything else at all ever. There’s a million ways OSX is a work of art in OS design. More than anything, it just works and multitasks smooth as a Swiss watch. Simple, intuitive, consistent. Yesterday I was using my iPhone and it said “share network password fro your Mac?” And it connected my to my local wireless. That’s beyond belief ease of use. OSX knows what it is.... a powerful consistent desktop OS, 1000x better than anything from the 1980s or 1990s. I was there in the 1980s and 1990s and it just wasn’t easy to use. Nothing was.
musicale 6y ago
> You are requested to create an account to log into your own computer, even on tiny hardware like a Raspberry Pi Not if you run RISC OS. You can even boot directly to a BBC BASIC prompt to get a full early 1980s PC experience! Turn it on, start entering code....
imgabe 6y ago
> Make each application one file. But...why? Why would I ever need to interact with any of the application files? Why would I need to move it to another portion of the disk? Give it a shortcut to click on to activate it and who cares? It could be running one file or a million files. The only files I care about are the ones I create and edit. I can't imagine any need to interact with the application files. If your users need to interact with the application files or move them around in any way, you've already failed at usability.
- wk_end 6y ago
  If you don't ever need to interact with them individually, then why expose them individually?
  - wvenable 6y ago
    The author mentioned "the Haiku operating system each application is one package, and each package is one file that is loop-mounted into the filesystem to make its contents accessible." Now if you don't ever need to interact with application files why invent all this complexity when you can just expose the files individually and not ever care about that again.
  - imgabe 6y ago
    Maybe it's easier for development if they're individual? Who knows? As a user the number of files needed for an application is irrelevant. Maybe the dictionary that Word uses for the spellchecker doesn't need to be a part of the executable, so if they want to update it, they can replace just that file and they don't have to make you download the entire program again?
- _ph_ 6y ago
  The way the Mac handles it, is a great way. An application is a directory with a special structure. The finder treats that directory like a file. You can double click it for launching the application, you can move it like a single files. Usually, no installation is required. That also means, deinstallation is a single delete. On the shell you can just cd into that directory like any other. This way, the application developer does get all the benefits of a file system, while the user all of having a single file. While you don't need to do this constantly, being able to relocate an application on your file system is a very nice thing. Like moving it to a different volume or disk. Having it an a users home or the system application directory. Especially, having any amount of compies of the application (different versions) in as many places as you want. Not having the need to "install" an application is a big advantage, not having to "deinstall" an even bigger. Having the application doesn't change your system. This is especially great if you run your systems for many years. Having to do a "clean install" is a symptom of a not cleanly separated system.
jsz0 6y ago
The only easy part of vintage computing was simplicity gained from highly limited software and hardware.
phendrenad2 6y ago
This is impossible. The internet killed that kind of simplicity. You just can't have the kind of minimalistic OS that you could back then. It wouldn't be able to handle the security and performance challenges of the modern web. Of course, if you just want a simpler GUI for Linux, then that is indeed possible. But that's an uphill battle for another reason... the underlying libraries that you'd build you hypothetical GUI on are all built with the assumption that the user wants a rich command-line and config file interface to everything. Also you'll have to give up modularity. If you build a GUI frontend for ALSA, you'll also need to make it work with PulseAudio and Jack.
nxpnsv 6y ago
I don't want to think about the amount of time I wasted on tweaking Windows and Linux dual boots in the 90s...
marcus_holmes 6y ago
Slightly alarmed by the implied air-quotes around "security". Does the author think there's no need for security? That it's not important? A large chunk of the problems we have now are because no-one thought about security in the 80's and 90's when the various protocols we use were being invented. It was only kinda safe because not connected to the internet. As soon as the internet came along all those simple protocols got abused royally, and all those simple OS's got pwned routinely. I remember those days. Being the family IT support, once a month I had to clean my sister's laptop of all the viral crap she kept clicking on. Today is better. Much, much better.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Except the protocol/format we use for communicating text in the public is terminally convoluted, requires executing arbitrary code, is laughably energy-inefficient and has only one or two apps left that can deal with it. When SGML on which HTML is based (also released in the 80s) was a "humanist" idea to prevent exactly that from happening.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > Slightly alarmed by the implied air-quotes around "security". Does the author think there's no need for security? That it's not important? I can't speak for the author, but I think a lot of this industry sacrifices way way too much in the name of nebulous "security". Case in point: Spectre and Meltdown are not likely to ever be a significant threat to any desktop computer user, nor to any server that is only running trusted code, yet a lot of IT people lost their shit over it and were willing to significantly degrade their performance via heavy handed mitigations.
  - api 6y ago
    It’s worse in networking where firewall admins block first and ask questions later, breaking VoIP, making video calls slow, and breaking anything P2P. The rationale is security but if you ask them what risk is being mitigated by blocking this or that they can’t answer. It’s superstition. The vast vast majority of targeted attacks today are by exploiting the least secure part of the system: the meat bag in front of it.
eecc 6y ago
It’s maybe something about having tools that are intrinsically more powerful. To pick on an example given in the article: File managers that “seamlessly” (air quotes intentional) support multiple network protocols and archive formats have a supposedly flat learning curve; so flat that no mental effort is expected. Indeed there is plenty and very confusing for anyone not prepared to it upfront. Firing up a dedicated - specific purpose - application primes the users’ attention and makes eventual struggles expected and even gratifying to solve. It’s a hunch, no hard proof for this; maybe some behavioral scientist can chime in
jug 6y ago
Not sure some here are missing his point but I think he isn’t talking about Windows or macOS, but Linux and even then not necessarily as a stand-alone OS but in a dual boot scenario too.
tpoacher 6y ago
"especially those based on linux" seriously? what godforsaken obscure unmaintained linux distro is _this_ guy using?
gregrata 6y ago
Uhhhh.... holy crap, sorry... but what is the author smoking? I started out with PC's in the early 80's. They were HARD to use (granted, as a pre-teen, I fell in love right away - but I was already a nerd). They were not intuitive. They didn't do very much. They generally sucked for most people, unless they were using a word processor (and even those were tough for some people) Today, everyone can use one. They are very powerful, do a lot of things, and are comparatively simple to use - I mean, my MOM can use the damn things, which she never could have done in the 80's and 90's. And with very little support for me!
- kolinko 6y ago
  +1, around half of the things the author mentions seems like a pure nostalgia. Some of the points contradict with each other - he praises having independent OSes (and read-only disks) in one point, and then he wishes for settings to be consistent through OSes. Also, some of the things he mentions already exist in MacOS, which is weird because he uses an old MacOS as an example. For example one application-one file is still true - most apps are packages, and you can have multiple versions of each app on the same MacOS, and it doesn't matter where you run them from. Sure, the settings are stored in separate directories, but this was also a conscious decision. In the times of DOS, you had your user files and folders scattered everywhere, and now it's in your home folder. He also postulates for an abandonment of linking ("each object representing a file, not a link to a file") - that's actually quite interesting. I think it would go badly quick, but a nice idea. Ah, and finally - no auto updates. Sorry, but if we have persistent internet, we need auto-updates for security reasons. I absolutely hate it at times (especially on Windows), but it's a necessity to keep the security :/
- keithnz 6y ago
  +1 also, I too came through that period, and it was a tricky time, but it was an exciting time as there were many different kinds of computers, and every advance was exciting, knowledge was hard to come by and we heavily relied on books and magazines and other people to find out things. If you went from one computer system to another, was only a slim chance you could do anything unless you had a manual or something to refer to.
beloch 6y ago
Before we get all nostalgic about MacOS, let's just take a moment to remember how far behind it was in the late 90's. Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking. MacOS did not. If a program running on MacOS didn't feel like relinquishing control back to the OS, tough. OSX finally added preemptive multitasking but, for a long time, it continued to provide little in the way of user customization. It was the Apple way or the highway. If you happened to like the Apple way this was fine. If you had other ideas, it was painful. Linux and Windows were both far more customizable. On the Windows side of things, DOS was beautifully simple but horribly limited and, at times, not very simple to use. Half the challenge of PC gaming in the 90's was just getting the games to run! Who remembers what IRQ their soundcard used? Things have gotten easier to use, but also more complicated. Complexity and ease of use are not necessarily opposing or entwined. Some Windows applications are contained entirely within their program folder. Executables, libraries, configuration files, all in one place. If you move it to another drive, all you have to do is update the shortcut and it will work. If you move it to a new PC, just run the executable and it will work, complete will all your old settings. If you want to mess with its config files, you know where they are. Other applications have bits and pieces widely distributed across various system folders hidden deep within hidden directories. If you try to move it, it will break. If you try to copy it to a new PC, it won't work. If you try to edit the config files, there might be two or three copies in different locations, one of which supersedes the others. We don't need to return to the dark days of MacOS and DOS to make things simpler under the hood and easier for users to mess around with. We all want to write programs that are intuitive when they're running, but perhaps we also need to make them intuitive to mess around with when they're not running. OS's and programs can still be complex and user friendly even if we embrace simpler and more hackable installation footprints. Heck, just leaving comments in the config files to explain what things do would be a giant leap forward for some programs. Stop treating software like turnkey installations and more like cars. Expect some of your customers to look under the hood and make modifications.
jhoechtl 6y ago
> Make each application one file. > Make the operating system one file. So another level of abstraction will make things easier? I doubt!
ohthehugemanate 6y ago
Don't get distracted by the OP's nostalgia. The point they are trying to make was that older OS's had much more decoupled concepts for things like changing OS, applications, and settings. Decoupled enough that everything was accessible to the user through a small handful of concepts. You had to understand a disk drive, how to move things in a file manager, and how to run things... and that was about it. Our current systems are the opposite: tightly integrated to the point where every action can cause an avalanche of secondary effects, and flexibility is greatly reduced. The short list of main recommendations are not crazy at all on this community: - boot from a read only, immutable OS on easily-replaceable media. (Ahem containers, nixOS) - applications should be encapsulated in a single object which can be executed from anywhere in your filesystem. (Flatpak, containers) - applications and the OS should be designed for offline by default. (Any user of EA games would back this idea) - only persist user settings across boots, ideally in an OS neutral format (containers) - expose less to zero UI configuration to the user (core design concept in Apple land, I gather) - single user no login by design (many linux distros, windows until recently...) There are more but you should read TFA. These are not radical concepts, they're the norm in other contexts.
bdastous 6y ago
Before the advent of Windows XP, keeping your PC fast and reliable meant reinstalling Windows at least annually.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Author: User interfaces were better in the desktop computers of the 80s and 90s. HN: Some other stuff was worse though, so your point is invalid. I really hate this place sometimes.
- christophilus 6y ago
  > Back in time when things were easy, things “just worked” right out of the box and you did not have to configure much To which my comment makes a number of counter points. You had to configure a lot. And things rarely just worked. And if they worked, they were rarely consistent. The article is an interesting read, but on nearly every point of it, I prefer today’s computers to any of the past. The exception being his point about apps requiring internet access and being generally hard to keep in multiple copy form.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    The vast majority of the article is talking about specific ways in which they were better, but HN has latched on to the "just works" and decided to dredge up everything from IRQ conflicts (a thing on PCs, while the article mostly talks about MacOS) to every software bug they ever encountered because they like being contrarian.
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
Ah the irony of considering linux more complicated than windows or mac because it doesn't hide the complexity... compared to adding an extra layer of complexity on top of the real complexity just to hid it.
mlindner 6y ago
Someone has never had to configure IRQs individually for each device and board they plugged in.
dragonwriter 6y ago
90s (Windows 95 and later, or any version of MacOS) personal computers weren't easier to use in any dimension than modern ones; 80s pre-PC ones, and DOS PCs, were only in a weird masochistic enthusiast sense where it took less work to get to a prompt for an fairly obscure and limited programming language/CLI, but more work to actually do anything significant with it. Any given hardware platform tended to be a more stable target over it's lifetime in the pre-PC era, which is a kind of simplicity (not really ease, but once you've climbed the learning curve the ground isn't shifting under you.) OTOH, any given hardware platform was likely to fade into irrelevance sooner and if you wanted to swap to something with decent current support more of what you learned would be irrelevant, so even that stability was of fairly limited utility.
fallingfrog 6y ago
Wow, were macs really this easy to use? I remember having to fuss with autoexec.bat and config.sys to squeeze a few more kilobytes of ram to get certain games to run (looking at you, wing commander) and having to worry about the difference between “expanded” and “extended” memory, and so on. Windows 95 and it’s descendants didn’t make things much better- now in addition to the actual file system there are virtual file systems (the registry) that frequently get out of sync with the actual one, causing additional problems. It’s an impressive achievement if macs really were this easy to use!

137 points by panic 6y ago

mikl 6y ago

Author seems to think PC users like to run multiple OSes on their machine. I think that might just be him, regular people have enough to learn in mastering a single OS, no need to add more. Also, macOS still has a nice GUI to set startup disk, and most of the other features he shows old macOS having. And the rest of this multi-OS pipe-dream, who wants any of this?

wyldfire 6y ago
Regular people don't know what an OS is.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  That may seem like an exaggeration but in my experience it's literally true. I tried to explain to my wife what "Linux" was but had to explain what "Operating System" is first, and I don't think I ever made much of an inroad on either. It's just not interesting or relevant to her life at all. My in-laws, foggedaboutit.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >It's just not interesting or relevant to her life at all. This is the key point I think a lot of tech people don't get. My dad's smart. He worked in pharma for many years and knows tons about a lot of the science (and business) related to that. He just never had any interest in learning about things like file systems and so forth. A tablet for him was my best gift to myself ever. (And he now just uses a large smartphone. He doesn't use the vast majority of its capabilities because he's just not interested in them; he uses what's of interest to him.)
    - wyldfire 6y ago
      > He just never had any interest in learning about things like file systems and so forth. Most people (especially today in 2020) don't know what a file is. And that's okay, or great even. A filesystem is a leap yet beyond that. Apple takes great pains to hide the filesystem from the user in iOS. And that was probably a really, really good move. They have the freedom to change how the internals of devices use files and may have gotten some security benefit as well. Mobile computing provided a great opportunity to enable some cool tech that breaks backwards compatibility. Like signed bootloaders, indexed-database-as-filesystem, permissions/capabilities. All of these were available on desktop OSs but haven't found a wide audience. Or hadn't, until much more recently. Sorry- bit of a tangent there. Point being: way back when, in order to be productive with a computer you had to know more about its design. But today, many things "just work" without need to understand how/why.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    My girlfriend is incredibly intelligent, but doesn't care much for computers or programming the way I do and just buys Apple stuff for its "just works" factor. That said, I was having trouble getting sound working on a Linux laptop one day, and it turned out to be because my user didn't belong to the "audio" group and so didn't have permission to play sound. I explained this to her, and she told me she understood why that would make sense, and why someone would want to design a system to work that way, even though it is not a system she, personally, would use. Aaaand this is why she is my girlfriend. :) Not to take away from your wife, I'm sure she's lovely. I'm just glad to be with someone who's both smart and empathetic enough to understand why I do what I do, and why I like the weird computer shit I like. (My girlfriend on the Amiga 500 I bought: "I like this. Why didn't this take over?")
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Not yet. "I used to be dismissive about tech issues; I started caring when I realized that tech is where the power struggles of this era will take place." -friend of mine I love sharing this quote because it is so prescient. Sleep too long, and we may wake in chains.
- pmarreck 6y ago
  And if you try to argue the merits of one OS over another having had much experience with both, they will argue back with you even though 99.9999% of their experience is with one OS
- bitwize 6y ago
  They have to be taught, and normies learn about things like this the way they learn about much of the world: through marketing. If the enormous hypetrain behind Windows 95 did one thing, it was to make "operating system" a household term -- because in order to care about Windows 95, people had to care about operating systems.
bsanr2 6y ago
"Oh, I run my games on GameOS because it doesn't take a bunch of resources for GUI animations and multitasking, but I use PrettyOS for just regular work. I've got high hopes for VROS, they say I can use a weaker system with my Vive than on Windows." People don't do it now because it's ridiculously difficult to do for limited utility.
- visarga 6y ago
  Many regular people have game console, laptop and phone. Three different devices, three OSes.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    What if you want to use the same form factor, same system, same files, you just want the system to allocate resources differently? That's what this hypothetical would be.

jart 6y ago

> Make each application one file. [...] Make the operating system one file. Yes and yes! That's actually exactly what I've been working on with Actually Portable Executable. https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/ape.html https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/ape.html > How could we simplify: Write a GUI bootloader Nooo. There's the problem. GUIs have always been a shitshow w.r.t. compatibility. I've pretty much come to the conclusion at this point that, if we want simple, we have to give up on wanting it with GUIs. Vendors just aren't going to ever agree. There's too much vision and financial incentive to compete. However terminals, are boring, and operating systems no longer have any reason to engineer incompatibilities. As of last year, they've all pretty much been like, yeah, we'll implement vt100 because we don't care anymore. Even Windows CMD prompt! It's great. This new consensus is going to make so much toil go away. For example, here's an app I wrote a few months ago. It's a single file TUI application. The binary runs on all the different operating systems and looks exactly the same. Truly build-once run-anywhere. It literally looks the same on Linux as it does in Windows command prompt and Mac too etc. It doesn't have any dependencies. It's about 200kb. https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/blinkenlights/index.html https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/blinkenlights/index.h... I've been using it lately testing tool, because I want these single file programs to boot from BIOS on bare metal too. I've got it working for stdio so far. So once I add a virtio ethernet driver it'll be golden. Especially for cloud deploys. Every program you compile is its own operating system which runs on all the other ones too. I call it the Cosmopolitan C Library (NOTE: this page is work in progress!) https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/cosmopolitan/index.html https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/cosmopolitan/index.ht...

causality0 6y ago
For me that would be exactly opposite of the direction I want things to go. I want more files and more editability. I want to be able to track down the audio file for that godawfully loud "CLANG!" sound Google Assistant makes and tear it out by the roots, then print it out and burn it for good measure.
- wtallis 6y ago
  The NeXTSTEP/Mac solution is to make the GUI treat application bundles as a single unit, while behind the scenes they're a transparent, self-describing directory hierarchy.

raldi 6y ago

We got an IBM PC XT in 1984. I disagree 180° with every claim about the past this article makes. Computers of today, and particularly mobile devices, are infinitely simpler and easier.

bestham 6y ago
But the IBM PC XT and Macintosh of 1984 were orthogonal to each other already in the year of 1984. You argument would stand if the Macintosh and the XT were on par in 1984, but whey were not.
- raldi 6y ago
  Things weren't much better on Macs; it's just that on DOS, when things weren't working you would type a bunch of different command line options and then give up, whereas on a Mac you would just give up. I'm having 90's flashbacks to debugging nonworking printers and my girlfriend asking why, after many months since the installation, "is Netscape showing up as a hard drive"? And then there's "no, you just closed all the windows; you didn't close the app"
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I was a DOS user at the time the Mac first came out and there were a few Macs around my grad school. My recollection is similar to yours. The fix on DOS might be something arcane related to config.sys files or whatever but if you banged at it long enough you could often (though certainly not always) get something to work eventually. Macs were more likely to just work out of the box. But if it didn't, you pretty much gave up because there was much less to twiddle with.

fancyfredbot 6y ago

I remember having to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys files in a text editor to install a mouse driver. I also remember having to set IRQs using actual jumpers on my soundcard. I actually loved all of that but it wasn't really easy.

raldi 6y ago
Not only did you have to worry about IRQ conflicts, some hardware didn't work well (or at all) at some of the offered IRQs. And there was no Google to help you.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Indeed. I remember cycling to the local library, searching the old serial terminals for a particular book that could explain an issue I was having, then order it to be sent to my local branch (as they invariably didn't have it) so I could pick it up a few days later. Just to solve a problem (usually pretty complex ones involving things like datasheets or programming manuals but still...). The internet has provided us a way to handle much more complex issues in much less time just by offering immediate access to shared knowledge. That alone makes things much easier these days than back then. But I feel it makes us dumber as well in a sense. Before the internet you couldn't start a major project without knowing all about it before you started. Now often we will just start, and google any problems on the way, often realising only later on that the initial approach was poorly chosen.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  I can still remember with horror a Windows NT networking class that needed every student machine to have three ISA Ethernet cards manually configured with non-conflicting settings. Can you have that ready by tomorrow, they asked after lunch...
  - pmarreck 6y ago
    wait why THREE?

blakesterz 6y ago

I feel like the third sentence of this post should've been the title: "Can we make a friendly Libre Desktop operating system with focus on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability?" I like that idea. Having lived through the 80s and 90s personal computing era, I can say there was very little that was easy. Especially the 80s. Everything was also super expensive. Things crashed all the time, I can remember hitting Save and having a program crash and losing work. Because I saved, so I wouldn't lose work. It took so much work to do anything back then. I guess it's easy to forget how much everything sucked. I don't disagree with the central idea here though. I do think something that focuses on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability is a nice idea. Though I can't imagine many people agree.

fabrice_d 6y ago
I think Elementary (https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/) is aiming at being that kind of OS. And it's really good!
- dghlsakjg 6y ago
  I tried out running elementary in a vm on my mac. It was actually a snappy responsive system even though it was inside a VM. Everything about that is amazing
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  That's just a fork of Ubuntu LTS right? There are many many lightweight Linux distros that are probably much smaller.
  - fabrice_d 6y ago
    No, it's not just a Ubuntu fork. Many apps are elementary specific, written in Vala iirc.
    - 7thaccount 6y ago
      So a commercial Ubuntu fork with some custom apps, got it. Still hardly groundbreaking though right? I'm thinking more of something like HaikuOS if you want something completely out there.

based2 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit

pcurve 6y ago
ah, I would spend hours colorizing icons using resedit 2.1.3. Instead, I should've been out playing balls. lol. re: the article, as much as I have a lot of fond memories of System 7, I don't think today's modern OS seem that bad. MS has been trying to abstract away legacy complexity bit by bit, it's very difficult to just throw everything away, the worst one being flaky file sharing functions. But over time, I'm sure we'll get to better place.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

I think this guy has a too-rosy view of the 80s and 90s. Probably used only Macs as most of his examples are about Mac. By the way, a Mac still lets you select a boot drive in the exact same way. And current Macs still remember the positioning of icons and on a Mac you can still run apps from anywhere (unless the developer didn't follow Apple's standards but that's not Apple's fault). If you take his comments purely within the Mac field of view which he seems to do, some of these statements are simply false. And the unrestricted, non-password users? Well yeah it would be nice but the cold dark world of the internet has caught up with that. Good luck with your botnets. I don't think he's ever edited config.sys and autoexec.bat files, struggled with setting nonconflicting IRQs with jumpers and set up XMS/EMS high-memory drivers, just to have enough to load all the TSRs you needed and have enough real memory available available to run a program. Or used Word Perfect which required a 'cheat sheet' with all the different function key combos. Most programs required classroom training for all non-geek people to use them. I loved that time too. But it was definitely not easier than it is now. By the way, someone looking for this simpler experience can find it in the mobile OSes. An iPad already provides most of these things while being secure (but at the expense of Apple deciding what you can and can't do with your device). A lot of people already use a mobile or tablet as their sole computing device.

foobarian 6y ago
1) Turn on computer. 2) 500ms go by 3) Computer prints "READY" and shows a blinking cursor. At this point you can start typing code. That is what I miss about 80s computing.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  4) Spend 10 minutes saving your carefully written code to tape. 5) Scream at the tape the next day because it stretched a bit and the computer now won't read it back, or your little sister recorded the spice girls over it :P I did love that time too though! But it did have its drawbacks. But really, this experience is not far away if you're looking for it. A raspberry pi kinda offers that. Maybe not the 500ms, but it boots in seconds to a CLI and it's cheap enough to just leave running. Windows 10 is also really fast at booting (basically because it secretly just hibernates its kernel but it's a smart and useful trick).

NuSkooler 6y ago

Listen, I love retro computing. And sure, the systems were much simpler. Systems get more complex over time. I wouldn't be typing in this edit field in a web browser within a window in a multitasking GUI OS if not. With that said, things certainly were not easier. Plug in a device now days and viola it works! Transfer a archive from Linux -> OS X -> Windows and you can view it (and even using the same multi-platform apps) across the board. ...the list goes on forever. Can things be easier? Sure? Simplicity? Yes! Is it all rainbows and unicorns? Nah (as people have pointed out already you lose control). Many systems exist for things like single file applications. Of course no one can agree on what that should look like it seems. AppImages, .apks (which are just Zip files), static binaries, containerized applications, etc. OS X has had .app's for a long time which are just a folder of files (and the common way to transfer that is a mountable image or archive). People have tried many times to come up with embedded icons in ELF. Why some Linux users push back is still beyond me. Yes we know we need multiple formats and resolutions. OK, support that. .desktop files are nice, but that shouldn't be something I have to mess around with generally. Most systems still don't have a nice way to even create these files (which let's be honest: are just the Windows equivalent to a .lnk desktop shortcut). Oof I could go on forever here. I think I'll stop.

zepto 6y ago

It’s not obvious how booting into different operating systems frequently simplifies things.

christophilus 6y ago

Weird. Today, I plug in a computer and it works. I install an OS and it works. It detects all of my hardware and gets online right away. My computer hasn’t randomly crashed in years. When I save my work, I don’t even consider the possibility that the save might fail and I’ll lose all of my changes. When I wonder how to do something, I can find the answer in seconds by typing plain English into one of several powerful web browsers. I also have a super computer in my pocket. Also, I have git which is so vastly better than anything I had in the 90s. We seem to have two very different experiences of past technology. One last thing. I installed Elementary OS on an old computer recently, and every app opened instantly. As in, I clicked it, and it was just there. No perceptible delay. I’m not entirely sure how they do it, but it seems they’re close to the goal in that department.

AnHonestComment 6y ago
I had Windows hard crash using Google Chrome on Hulu. I had Windows reset itself in the middle of a long-running calculation overnight, because obviously 100% CPU usage and programs that refuse to quit is a signal it’s safe to power cycle the computer. I routinely have to fight my devices to do what I say, because they re-interpreted valid words into other ones. I think modern tech reliability is as overstated as historic rosiness — this turd is polished, but it’s not more functional.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Windows is absolutely more stable now than it was in the 90s. Not even comparable.
  - keyle 6y ago
    Hmm Windows NT was a rock.
    - accountofme 6y ago
      My fav OS was Win2k ... Ahhh memories

lupinglade 6y ago

So true. I’d love to have a modern macOS that is as streamlined and well thought out as OS 8/9 or a modern NeXTSTEP. Instead we have bloated, buggy, fugly operating systems that restrict what you can do more and more with every new version. What a shame.

vidanay 6y ago

Why don't we bring back pages of 6pt font hex codes from the back of Byte magazine too?

musicale 6y ago
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I think I'm all for it! :D Ancient computer magazines seem like magical treasure troves. I recently linked to an issue of Creative Computing which included the source listing for the Oregon Trail game that you could type in and run, as well as an article describing the game and a transcript of someone playing (and actually winning, haha.) I'd say that's pretty interesting and educational because the code has to go through your brain and out your fingers, and then you have to debug it afterward. It cracks the black box open and shows you the inside components inside; even if you might not fully understand them immediately you can see what they are made of and how they work at a micro level. And limited system memory, page count, and and finger endurance seem to have kept source listings reasonably short and manageable, while still enabling interesting and non-trivial applications. There may also be more incentive to explore both the gameplay and its implementation in some detail since you put so much effort into it, rather than just clicking on the next opaque binary download. That being said... github is also a magical treasure trove, but usually without the friendly magazine articles explaining the software, so the onramp is steeper even if you don't have to type the code in yourself. I'd like to see a github index of short-form, relatively self-contained software of this sort. Ideally with accompanying articles. ;-) I'd also like to see more modern magazines like the MagPi.

bnkamalesh 6y ago

Modern day IDEs alone are worth it for me!

temporallobe 6y ago

The “good old days” of simplicity OP talks about can be experienced by using a tablet. Turn on, use, turn off. It’s sufficient for lots of everyday computing tasks and can even be paired with a keyboard and mouse. Everything “just works” for the most part and it’s a very simplified version of the typical desktop experience.

machinelabo 6y ago
Except when you want to type something - which is pretty much every 30 seconds or so; you have to put the iPad down on a surface, then type it with your fingers and off you go. If I am using a pencil, it is annoying as hell to type with one hand. iPad is only great for taking notes + consuming long form content. Browsing the internet requires keyboard input.
- lolinder 6y ago
  The amount of keyboard input required for browsing can be easily filled in by voice dictation. Or a lousy on screen keyboard. Creating long form content absolutely requires a keyboard, but the parent even mentions that as part of the "it just works" of a tablet.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I sort of agree with the parent. I get into serious browsing/searching/etc. and I usually just end up grabbing a laptop. I can do it on my tablet but it just seems like too much work. Of course, that may reflect habits and if I were to only have a tablet I'm sure I could make it work. My dad certainly has no trouble ordering from Amazon all the time just using his phone.
  - jasonjayr 6y ago
    Voice dictation .... if you are comfortable with sending all your input to a random 3rd party server. That's how the 2 major providers work nowadays unfortunately. We had mediocre on-device voice dictation when Pentiums + 486's were all the rage; (ie. Dragon Naturally Speaking 1.0 in 1997) why can't we get on-device voice dictation on these ARM devices at similar or slightly better quality, since these SoC's are 10x what we could do in the 90s?

hlehmann 6y ago

The author of this article obviously never actually tried to use a computer in the 80's. Don't forget to edit your autoexec.bat file before you try to play that video game! Internet? Shiiiat, dial up your local BBS and try to download some files before your family starts complaining that they can't use the phone. Also, don't forget to release the Turbo button so that your game doesn't run at twice normal speed. Want to install that new version of WordPerfect? That'll be twenty floppy disks that have to be inserted in the proper sequence, and don't you dare get them out of order. Sheesh,... wankers.

ilaksh 6y ago

Interesting. I hope he realizes he can also just run that old system in an emulator and have things exactly the way they were.

phkahler 6y ago

>> Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. Because in the 80s things would boot to a DOS prompt or a basic interpreter and you had to know some commands to type to get anything to happen. Today they boot to GUI with useful applications to run. Well, except for Windows.

grawprog 6y ago

I'm not sure what dreamland the author lived in. Computers today are relatively about the same hassle wise as they've always been. The exact problems may have changed, but I find myself experiencing roughly the same amount of problems with computers as I always have which is basically: Enough that I always realize they're there and sometimes they annoy me but overall, having a computer and having access to all the awesome things computers can do is worth the hassle.

tracerbulletx 6y ago

This is not how I remember computing in the 80s and 90s.

musicale 6y ago

I tend to agree with this assessment. As the author demonstrates, classic Macintosh computers are/were much simpler than modern Macs and also easier to use. They typically also sported a tiny black and white display (vs. 27" or larger 5K or 4K full/wide color and HDR displays), extremely primitive multimedia capabilities (Macromedia director vs. the web, iMovie, Unity...), much slower storage (slow floppy disks and hard drives vs. modern flash storage), and was more likely to crash or freeze due to lack of memory protection and preemptive multitasking (though it didn't have the problem of breaking when you lose internet connectivity like modern macOS.) Modern IP networking is powerful and connects you to the world, but AppleTalk was largely plug-and-play and had nice dynamic resource discovery (which influenced the design of Bonjour/mDNS.) Note classic Macs could be connected to the IP internet, but they lacked web browsers until ~1992. ;-) As far as Apple is concerned, I think iOS may be the inheritor of much of the simplicity of the classic Macintosh: one app at a time, simplified multitasking, hood welded shut with minimal user-serviceable components inside. But an iPhone also does much more than a typical Macintosh of the 1980s or early 1990s, notably full wireless, mobile internet access with modern web support, streaming video, television, and music, wireless/mobile voice and video calls, multimedia messaging and email, full speech recognition and automatic dictation, Siri/digital assistant, full voice control of the device, automatic language translation, accelerated 3D graphics with augmented reality support, automatic computational photography, high-resolution, color digital painting and photo editing with dozens of layers, video editing, CD-quality sampling, music synthesis, and multitrack recording, millions of downloadable apps, etc.. And it runs all day on batteries and fits in your pocket.

thewebcount 6y ago
> (Macromedia director vs. the web, iMovie, Unity...) For the record, iMovie originally ran on Classic macOS 8 in 1999.
- musicale 6y ago
  You are indeed correct, but 1999 is more "late 90s" and by that point the Macintosh (and Mac OS) had become vastly more powerful, with the PowerPC G3/G4, color graphics, GPUs, etc., not to mention advances in the web platform. Note I said "Classic Macs" (think compact Macintosh models with 68000 processors) rather than classic Mac OS. By 1999 the shift to OS X was also underway, with Mac OS X Server 1.0 released that year.

deeg 6y ago

These kinds of articles come up occasionally about how good things were back on the day but I think it's largely due to forgetting all the problems, like: - BSOD - Running out of memory and trying to shift stuff to high mem. - Software would come with 20 install floppies. Good luck if it failed on #18. - Running out of ports for external devices. - Plug 'n Play that didn't play. - Modems over analog telephony. There's a long list.

coliveira 6y ago
It is true that things were not perfect in the 80s, but the author has a point. The point is that software designers had the goal of making things at least seem easier and consistent for users. That is the reason for standardized interfaces and APIs. Nowadays, computing seems to have become a free for all, where developers don't care (or have lost the hope of) presenting software in a way that is easy to use. Users are supposed to magically "figure out" how things work, and if they don't is because they're "stupid". Software users nowadays are supposed to put up with whatever crappy interface is was designed last week, just for the sake of "refreshing the UI" (see the disastrous UI updates promoted by Google and FB).
- kolinko 6y ago
  Well, the point of making users "figure it out" is so that you don't need a 100-page manual, or a training session to use the software. As for the fact that interfaces change - I noticed that it's an issue mostly with Windows&Linux. MacOS has a high consistency of interfaces across the apps - might be due to a HIG that Apple publishes?
Firehawke 6y ago
I could write a book on the headaches of getting certain hardware to actually go to an IRQ and/or address that won't conflict with another device. That hell went from MS-DOS all the way into Windows 98 and only went away once Windows 2000/XP made PnP actually work reliably.
fragsworth 6y ago
> Plug 'n Play that didn't play We called it "Plug 'n Pray".

known 6y ago

I think we have a default for all options in Linux platform

4778468d 6y ago

OS X is an incredible operating system, vastly more powerful than anything else at all ever. There’s a million ways OSX is a work of art in OS design. More than anything, it just works and multitasks smooth as a Swiss watch. Simple, intuitive, consistent. Yesterday I was using my iPhone and it said “share network password fro your Mac?” And it connected my to my local wireless. That’s beyond belief ease of use. OSX knows what it is.... a powerful consistent desktop OS, 1000x better than anything from the 1980s or 1990s. I was there in the 1980s and 1990s and it just wasn’t easy to use. Nothing was.

musicale 6y ago

> You are requested to create an account to log into your own computer, even on tiny hardware like a Raspberry Pi Not if you run RISC OS. You can even boot directly to a BBC BASIC prompt to get a full early 1980s PC experience! Turn it on, start entering code....

imgabe 6y ago

> Make each application one file. But...why? Why would I ever need to interact with any of the application files? Why would I need to move it to another portion of the disk? Give it a shortcut to click on to activate it and who cares? It could be running one file or a million files. The only files I care about are the ones I create and edit. I can't imagine any need to interact with the application files. If your users need to interact with the application files or move them around in any way, you've already failed at usability.

wk_end 6y ago
If you don't ever need to interact with them individually, then why expose them individually?
- wvenable 6y ago
  The author mentioned "the Haiku operating system each application is one package, and each package is one file that is loop-mounted into the filesystem to make its contents accessible." Now if you don't ever need to interact with application files why invent all this complexity when you can just expose the files individually and not ever care about that again.
- imgabe 6y ago
  Maybe it's easier for development if they're individual? Who knows? As a user the number of files needed for an application is irrelevant. Maybe the dictionary that Word uses for the spellchecker doesn't need to be a part of the executable, so if they want to update it, they can replace just that file and they don't have to make you download the entire program again?
_ph_ 6y ago
The way the Mac handles it, is a great way. An application is a directory with a special structure. The finder treats that directory like a file. You can double click it for launching the application, you can move it like a single files. Usually, no installation is required. That also means, deinstallation is a single delete. On the shell you can just cd into that directory like any other. This way, the application developer does get all the benefits of a file system, while the user all of having a single file. While you don't need to do this constantly, being able to relocate an application on your file system is a very nice thing. Like moving it to a different volume or disk. Having it an a users home or the system application directory. Especially, having any amount of compies of the application (different versions) in as many places as you want. Not having the need to "install" an application is a big advantage, not having to "deinstall" an even bigger. Having the application doesn't change your system. This is especially great if you run your systems for many years. Having to do a "clean install" is a symptom of a not cleanly separated system.

jsz0 6y ago

The only easy part of vintage computing was simplicity gained from highly limited software and hardware.

phendrenad2 6y ago

This is impossible. The internet killed that kind of simplicity. You just can't have the kind of minimalistic OS that you could back then. It wouldn't be able to handle the security and performance challenges of the modern web. Of course, if you just want a simpler GUI for Linux, then that is indeed possible. But that's an uphill battle for another reason... the underlying libraries that you'd build you hypothetical GUI on are all built with the assumption that the user wants a rich command-line and config file interface to everything. Also you'll have to give up modularity. If you build a GUI frontend for ALSA, you'll also need to make it work with PulseAudio and Jack.

nxpnsv 6y ago

I don't want to think about the amount of time I wasted on tweaking Windows and Linux dual boots in the 90s...

marcus_holmes 6y ago

Slightly alarmed by the implied air-quotes around "security". Does the author think there's no need for security? That it's not important? A large chunk of the problems we have now are because no-one thought about security in the 80's and 90's when the various protocols we use were being invented. It was only kinda safe because not connected to the internet. As soon as the internet came along all those simple protocols got abused royally, and all those simple OS's got pwned routinely. I remember those days. Being the family IT support, once a month I had to clean my sister's laptop of all the viral crap she kept clicking on. Today is better. Much, much better.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Except the protocol/format we use for communicating text in the public is terminally convoluted, requires executing arbitrary code, is laughably energy-inefficient and has only one or two apps left that can deal with it. When SGML on which HTML is based (also released in the 80s) was a "humanist" idea to prevent exactly that from happening.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> Slightly alarmed by the implied air-quotes around "security". Does the author think there's no need for security? That it's not important? I can't speak for the author, but I think a lot of this industry sacrifices way way too much in the name of nebulous "security". Case in point: Spectre and Meltdown are not likely to ever be a significant threat to any desktop computer user, nor to any server that is only running trusted code, yet a lot of IT people lost their shit over it and were willing to significantly degrade their performance via heavy handed mitigations.
- api 6y ago
  It’s worse in networking where firewall admins block first and ask questions later, breaking VoIP, making video calls slow, and breaking anything P2P. The rationale is security but if you ask them what risk is being mitigated by blocking this or that they can’t answer. It’s superstition. The vast vast majority of targeted attacks today are by exploiting the least secure part of the system: the meat bag in front of it.

eecc 6y ago

It’s maybe something about having tools that are intrinsically more powerful. To pick on an example given in the article: File managers that “seamlessly” (air quotes intentional) support multiple network protocols and archive formats have a supposedly flat learning curve; so flat that no mental effort is expected. Indeed there is plenty and very confusing for anyone not prepared to it upfront. Firing up a dedicated - specific purpose - application primes the users’ attention and makes eventual struggles expected and even gratifying to solve. It’s a hunch, no hard proof for this; maybe some behavioral scientist can chime in

jug 6y ago

Not sure some here are missing his point but I think he isn’t talking about Windows or macOS, but Linux and even then not necessarily as a stand-alone OS but in a dual boot scenario too.

tpoacher 6y ago

"especially those based on linux" seriously? what godforsaken obscure unmaintained linux distro is _this_ guy using?

gregrata 6y ago

Uhhhh.... holy crap, sorry... but what is the author smoking? I started out with PC's in the early 80's. They were HARD to use (granted, as a pre-teen, I fell in love right away - but I was already a nerd). They were not intuitive. They didn't do very much. They generally sucked for most people, unless they were using a word processor (and even those were tough for some people) Today, everyone can use one. They are very powerful, do a lot of things, and are comparatively simple to use - I mean, my MOM can use the damn things, which she never could have done in the 80's and 90's. And with very little support for me!

kolinko 6y ago
+1, around half of the things the author mentions seems like a pure nostalgia. Some of the points contradict with each other - he praises having independent OSes (and read-only disks) in one point, and then he wishes for settings to be consistent through OSes. Also, some of the things he mentions already exist in MacOS, which is weird because he uses an old MacOS as an example. For example one application-one file is still true - most apps are packages, and you can have multiple versions of each app on the same MacOS, and it doesn't matter where you run them from. Sure, the settings are stored in separate directories, but this was also a conscious decision. In the times of DOS, you had your user files and folders scattered everywhere, and now it's in your home folder. He also postulates for an abandonment of linking ("each object representing a file, not a link to a file") - that's actually quite interesting. I think it would go badly quick, but a nice idea. Ah, and finally - no auto updates. Sorry, but if we have persistent internet, we need auto-updates for security reasons. I absolutely hate it at times (especially on Windows), but it's a necessity to keep the security :/
keithnz 6y ago
+1 also, I too came through that period, and it was a tricky time, but it was an exciting time as there were many different kinds of computers, and every advance was exciting, knowledge was hard to come by and we heavily relied on books and magazines and other people to find out things. If you went from one computer system to another, was only a slim chance you could do anything unless you had a manual or something to refer to.

beloch 6y ago

Before we get all nostalgic about MacOS, let's just take a moment to remember how far behind it was in the late 90's. Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking. MacOS did not. If a program running on MacOS didn't feel like relinquishing control back to the OS, tough. OSX finally added preemptive multitasking but, for a long time, it continued to provide little in the way of user customization. It was the Apple way or the highway. If you happened to like the Apple way this was fine. If you had other ideas, it was painful. Linux and Windows were both far more customizable. On the Windows side of things, DOS was beautifully simple but horribly limited and, at times, not very simple to use. Half the challenge of PC gaming in the 90's was just getting the games to run! Who remembers what IRQ their soundcard used? Things have gotten easier to use, but also more complicated. Complexity and ease of use are not necessarily opposing or entwined. Some Windows applications are contained entirely within their program folder. Executables, libraries, configuration files, all in one place. If you move it to another drive, all you have to do is update the shortcut and it will work. If you move it to a new PC, just run the executable and it will work, complete will all your old settings. If you want to mess with its config files, you know where they are. Other applications have bits and pieces widely distributed across various system folders hidden deep within hidden directories. If you try to move it, it will break. If you try to copy it to a new PC, it won't work. If you try to edit the config files, there might be two or three copies in different locations, one of which supersedes the others. We don't need to return to the dark days of MacOS and DOS to make things simpler under the hood and easier for users to mess around with. We all want to write programs that are intuitive when they're running, but perhaps we also need to make them intuitive to mess around with when they're not running. OS's and programs can still be complex and user friendly even if we embrace simpler and more hackable installation footprints. Heck, just leaving comments in the config files to explain what things do would be a giant leap forward for some programs. Stop treating software like turnkey installations and more like cars. Expect some of your customers to look under the hood and make modifications.

jhoechtl 6y ago

> Make each application one file. > Make the operating system one file. So another level of abstraction will make things easier? I doubt!

ohthehugemanate 6y ago

Don't get distracted by the OP's nostalgia. The point they are trying to make was that older OS's had much more decoupled concepts for things like changing OS, applications, and settings. Decoupled enough that everything was accessible to the user through a small handful of concepts. You had to understand a disk drive, how to move things in a file manager, and how to run things... and that was about it. Our current systems are the opposite: tightly integrated to the point where every action can cause an avalanche of secondary effects, and flexibility is greatly reduced. The short list of main recommendations are not crazy at all on this community: - boot from a read only, immutable OS on easily-replaceable media. (Ahem containers, nixOS) - applications should be encapsulated in a single object which can be executed from anywhere in your filesystem. (Flatpak, containers) - applications and the OS should be designed for offline by default. (Any user of EA games would back this idea) - only persist user settings across boots, ideally in an OS neutral format (containers) - expose less to zero UI configuration to the user (core design concept in Apple land, I gather) - single user no login by design (many linux distros, windows until recently...) There are more but you should read TFA. These are not radical concepts, they're the norm in other contexts.

bdastous 6y ago

Before the advent of Windows XP, keeping your PC fast and reliable meant reinstalling Windows at least annually.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

Author: User interfaces were better in the desktop computers of the 80s and 90s. HN: Some other stuff was worse though, so your point is invalid. I really hate this place sometimes.

christophilus 6y ago
> Back in time when things were easy, things “just worked” right out of the box and you did not have to configure much To which my comment makes a number of counter points. You had to configure a lot. And things rarely just worked. And if they worked, they were rarely consistent. The article is an interesting read, but on nearly every point of it, I prefer today’s computers to any of the past. The exception being his point about apps requiring internet access and being generally hard to keep in multiple copy form.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  The vast majority of the article is talking about specific ways in which they were better, but HN has latched on to the "just works" and decided to dredge up everything from IRQ conflicts (a thing on PCs, while the article mostly talks about MacOS) to every software bug they ever encountered because they like being contrarian.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago

Ah the irony of considering linux more complicated than windows or mac because it doesn't hide the complexity... compared to adding an extra layer of complexity on top of the real complexity just to hid it.

mlindner 6y ago

Someone has never had to configure IRQs individually for each device and board they plugged in.

dragonwriter 6y ago

90s (Windows 95 and later, or any version of MacOS) personal computers weren't easier to use in any dimension than modern ones; 80s pre-PC ones, and DOS PCs, were only in a weird masochistic enthusiast sense where it took less work to get to a prompt for an fairly obscure and limited programming language/CLI, but more work to actually do anything significant with it. Any given hardware platform tended to be a more stable target over it's lifetime in the pre-PC era, which is a kind of simplicity (not really ease, but once you've climbed the learning curve the ground isn't shifting under you.) OTOH, any given hardware platform was likely to fade into irrelevance sooner and if you wanted to swap to something with decent current support more of what you learned would be irrelevant, so even that stability was of fairly limited utility.

fallingfrog 6y ago

Wow, were macs really this easy to use? I remember having to fuss with autoexec.bat and config.sys to squeeze a few more kilobytes of ram to get certain games to run (looking at you, wing commander) and having to worry about the difference between “expanded” and “extended” memory, and so on. Windows 95 and it’s descendants didn’t make things much better- now in addition to the actual file system there are virtual file systems (the registry) that frequently get out of sync with the actual one, causing additional problems. It’s an impressive achievement if macs really were this easy to use!