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In the example of your Amiga, your hard drive failed, but it probably would still boot right into any game from any floppy that didn't require workbench to have

In the example of your Amiga, your hard drive failed, but it probably would still boot right into any game from any floppy that didn't require workbench to have been booted from floppy or HD. The game could very well have been written in workbench booted from workbench/assembler from floppy. The same game, replicated in Unity, requires a several gigabyte download just for the developer to light up a white pixel on a black background in Unity. Is the juice of Unity worth the squeeze? It depends on the game I think. Using Unity to get a Super Meat Boy clone on a Nintendo switch starts to ride the line of absurdity (i.e. using a massively complex and capable game engine to make a knock off of a beefed up version of a flash game that was paying homage to games written in 6502 assembly and booted instantly and never crashed).

arexxbifs 6y ago
> In the example of your Amiga, your hard drive failed The crucial part here is that software caused the hard drive to fail. That was my point - I think it's easy to forget how fragile most home computer OS:es were 25-30 years ago compared to today.
- ziaddotcom 6y ago
  Bad software and bad UI corrupts usb drives all day long in 2021.
  - arexxbifs 6y ago
    Yes, bad things can still happen. What I'm trying to say is bad things used to happen, too, quite frequently and on very simple systems, and that his points about gradually diminishing robustness and productivity are easy to refute. I'm of the opinion that computers today - despite layers of abstraction and growing complexity - are more robust and lets us be more productive than ever. Abstraction fosters ignorance and complexity is fragile, I agree with him on those points. But I also think he makes very sweeping, erroneous statements about software and development.
meheleventyone 6y ago
That's not really a like for like comparison though. You could for example light up a white pixel on a black background in the browser, which almost everyone has installed by default, or using the basic OS APIs or by downloading PICO-8 which is pretty small IIRC. There are tradeoffs being made in all three choices and each will suit a different context.
- ziaddotcom 6y ago
  Does anyone seriously write games for the browser anymore? Can Jonathan target the browser to make Braid, and seriously expect any commercial success? Maybe you'll think "What about Celeste?" at which point you'll have only proven both of our points equally at best.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Yes they do. There are also plenty of games written on a web stack and shipped as executables.
    - ziaddotcom 6y ago
      And how is that meaningfully different or better than using unity to ship an executable? I thought your whole point was that everyone already has a stable browser, and shipping games as some bare metal or in some half bare metal form is really the developers imposition if the game could have just as well run in a browser.
      - pharke 6y ago
        There are still people developing efficient and capable game engines. Godot[0] is a good example of one that has achieved widespread success. It's a few dozen megabytes in size, does 2d and 3d, supports VR, and can target Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS and HTML5/WebAssembly. It's open source and free as in beer too. [0] https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
> In the example of your Amiga, your hard drive failed, but it probably would still boot right into any game from any floppy [...] The same game, replicated in Unity, requires a several gigabyte You have a good point to make, but the argument you've employed is bad. When you said, > In the days of the Amiga or the Archimedes, it was quite possible to boot entire app or os/app combo and just leave the computer on indefinitely, without it crashing itself even if untouched. You've mixed up reliability with understandably & maintainability. In an uptime competition, a retrocomputer will lose the game to many modern computers, it's almost guaranteed. But it's not the point. The point is what happens after it's down. If it's a retrocomputer, it's possible for a single person to understand every aspect of the computer and to perform troubleshooting down to the component level. It's also easy for a single hobbyist to build one's own computer using the 6502 chip. But it's usually impractical or impossible on modern hardware. My personal understanding on the thesis of the talk is that modern computers have much less understandably & maintainability than retrocomputers, and this, in the long term, makes the civilization as a whole, less reliable. It's not a question of how durable we can make a single computer to be. You can make a better argument if you stop saying how reliable retrocomputers are and focusing on understandably and complexity.
- ziaddotcom 6y ago
  I don't make the argument that they were more reliable now or then than today's PC, they almost weren't and aren't. The problem is how we got more reliable pcs today is in the context of people who had access to both. Some generation in the future won't have access to living human beings for the day the first electronic computer came into existence as we ourselves have access to now. Notice I said "even if left untouched." Perhaps that was too charitable, as these retropcs, without memory protection, would often crash if metaphorically "touched." It would happen often with productivity apps, much less so with games. As time has gone on with pcs, this seems to have flipped, a fair trade for the time being.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    Hmm, so your argument was not reliability of retrocomputers in paticular, but more generally, "how the hardware worked" (and some just happened to be reliable enough for many people), and all these things shaped the understanding of the next generation of innovators who invented our PCs. Thus it's important to preserve the hardware as a key of understanding how we get here from there, because there will be no living witness for the future generation - and this is your actual point. I think I now understand your argument now.

arexxbifs 6y ago

> In the example of your Amiga, your hard drive failed The crucial part here is that software caused the hard drive to fail. That was my point - I think it's easy to forget how fragile most home computer OS:es were 25-30 years ago compared to today.

ziaddotcom 6y ago
Bad software and bad UI corrupts usb drives all day long in 2021.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  Yes, bad things can still happen. What I'm trying to say is bad things used to happen, too, quite frequently and on very simple systems, and that his points about gradually diminishing robustness and productivity are easy to refute. I'm of the opinion that computers today - despite layers of abstraction and growing complexity - are more robust and lets us be more productive than ever. Abstraction fosters ignorance and complexity is fragile, I agree with him on those points. But I also think he makes very sweeping, erroneous statements about software and development.

meheleventyone 6y ago

That's not really a like for like comparison though. You could for example light up a white pixel on a black background in the browser, which almost everyone has installed by default, or using the basic OS APIs or by downloading PICO-8 which is pretty small IIRC. There are tradeoffs being made in all three choices and each will suit a different context.

ziaddotcom 6y ago
Does anyone seriously write games for the browser anymore? Can Jonathan target the browser to make Braid, and seriously expect any commercial success? Maybe you'll think "What about Celeste?" at which point you'll have only proven both of our points equally at best.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Yes they do. There are also plenty of games written on a web stack and shipped as executables.
  - ziaddotcom 6y ago
    And how is that meaningfully different or better than using unity to ship an executable? I thought your whole point was that everyone already has a stable browser, and shipping games as some bare metal or in some half bare metal form is really the developers imposition if the game could have just as well run in a browser.
    - pharke 6y ago
      There are still people developing efficient and capable game engines. Godot[0] is a good example of one that has achieved widespread success. It's a few dozen megabytes in size, does 2d and 3d, supports VR, and can target Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS and HTML5/WebAssembly. It's open source and free as in beer too. [0] https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

> In the example of your Amiga, your hard drive failed, but it probably would still boot right into any game from any floppy [...] The same game, replicated in Unity, requires a several gigabyte You have a good point to make, but the argument you've employed is bad. When you said, > In the days of the Amiga or the Archimedes, it was quite possible to boot entire app or os/app combo and just leave the computer on indefinitely, without it crashing itself even if untouched. You've mixed up reliability with understandably & maintainability. In an uptime competition, a retrocomputer will lose the game to many modern computers, it's almost guaranteed. But it's not the point. The point is what happens after it's down. If it's a retrocomputer, it's possible for a single person to understand every aspect of the computer and to perform troubleshooting down to the component level. It's also easy for a single hobbyist to build one's own computer using the 6502 chip. But it's usually impractical or impossible on modern hardware. My personal understanding on the thesis of the talk is that modern computers have much less understandably & maintainability than retrocomputers, and this, in the long term, makes the civilization as a whole, less reliable. It's not a question of how durable we can make a single computer to be. You can make a better argument if you stop saying how reliable retrocomputers are and focusing on understandably and complexity.

ziaddotcom 6y ago
I don't make the argument that they were more reliable now or then than today's PC, they almost weren't and aren't. The problem is how we got more reliable pcs today is in the context of people who had access to both. Some generation in the future won't have access to living human beings for the day the first electronic computer came into existence as we ourselves have access to now. Notice I said "even if left untouched." Perhaps that was too charitable, as these retropcs, without memory protection, would often crash if metaphorically "touched." It would happen often with productivity apps, much less so with games. As time has gone on with pcs, this seems to have flipped, a fair trade for the time being.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  Hmm, so your argument was not reliability of retrocomputers in paticular, but more generally, "how the hardware worked" (and some just happened to be reliable enough for many people), and all these things shaped the understanding of the next generation of innovators who invented our PCs. Thus it's important to preserve the hardware as a key of understanding how we get here from there, because there will be no living witness for the future generation - and this is your actual point. I think I now understand your argument now.