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> and the whole scene reminds me how far we have come. Yeah, overcomplicating every single thing, piling tens of layers of ever more generalized and inefficien

> and the whole scene reminds me how far we have come. Yeah, overcomplicating every single thing, piling tens of layers of ever more generalized and inefficient abstractions on top of each other, and so on. Imagine not needing several gigabytes of RAM just to browse the web or use instant messaging. Imagine software developers actually understanding what exactly they're doing and what consequences their choices have. I love old offline-first software. It was never rushed and was not made to be constantly updated. It just did its job.

anyfoo 6y ago
Imagine losing all your work because a stray pointer in your word processor mistakenly pointed to a hardware register. Imagine not being able to upgrade the hardware or even the software, because programs access hardware directly and directly interact with internal OS data structures. Imagine having to essentially restart the computer and go through minutes of loading time to look something up in another piece of software. I'm a big retro computing enthusiast, and I'm not happy about the current state of abstractions (especially with web stuff), but there's definitely been advancements also.
- grishka 6y ago
  Virtual memory and memory protection are good things, there's no denying that. As are operating systems with clearly defined APIs, drivers, and a clean separation between kernel space and user space. But I would still say that even with those problems present, old software does feel quite a bit more reliable than the modern one. Things generally don't break themselves because they've auto-updated while you weren't looking. And UI doesn't change on its own because there's a thousand server-side toggles for A/B tests. Old software generally was made as a tool, it served its users. Modern software is made to pursue its developer's own agenda first and foremost.
  - anyfoo 6y ago
    I'd be careful whether you're not looking at things through nostalgia-colored glasses, as humans are well known to do. Computers crashed and exhibited data loss all the time back then. PCs came with very prominent reset buttons, and when both Linux and Windows NT came up, the prospect that you could run your machine for an entire day without having to reboot was a revelation. It wasn't different on 8 bit micros: My C64 was very easy to upset, and I bet most people turned it off and back on to get it into a known state when switching programs, instead of risking that the previous software left some interfering bits somewhere. Sure, it was easy to power cycle a C64 and took mere seconds, but it was also very necessary. Well into the 90s there was a strong general attitude of having to reset every now and then just to keep things from diverging too badly. Computers crashing, hanging, and losing data was so ubiquitous that it was part of mainstream humor much more than it is now. Then, towards the end of the 90s, when things started to get better, people were so proud of uptime, that they used to brag about it in forums and chats. Nowadays, my computers, smart phones and similar devices usually run for weeks, pretty much only rebooting for software updates. That isn't always the case, but it's certainly orders of magnitudes better than the very fragile balance back then.
    - grishka 6y ago
      Don't get me wrong, modern technology is superior in many ways. The problem I'm picking on here is that of the conflict of interest between the users and the developers. And this is absolutely not helped by the proliferation of predatory code signing and governments always siding with corporations when people try to take matter into their own hands. The problem with modern technology is that many of its upsides are compensated by software developers. You know, "disks are big, networks are fast, memory is plentiful, you don't need to count CPU cycles in $year" kind of mentality. > Nowadays, my computers, smart phones and similar devices usually run for weeks, pretty much only rebooting for software updates. On my macbook, something is leaking memory. I'm suspecting the nvidia GPU driver. I have to reboot it every week or two or else it'll start freezing even while I'm typing something.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Interestingly, one could run multiple instances of retro computers and their environments and get many of those advances. Just a random thought.
  - grishka 6y ago
    Actually yes, by running retro software in an emulator on a modern system you're getting mostly best of both worlds.
retrac 6y ago
Much of it is a tradeoff between features, generality and bloat. A good chunk of that gigabyte of RAM to render a webpage goes into stuff like vector font rendering so it can display nicely at any size on any display. And Unicode handling so it can display Chinese and Russian as well as English. I suppose both outline fonts and Unicode are bloaty in their own right; such allegations have been leveled against them before. Still, those sort of features come with pretty significant cost and are largely invisible until you need them.
- grishka 6y ago
  I am Russian, I know this whole encoding problem first-hand. I'm genuinely envious to people who can get by with just a single Latin-script keyboard layout. Unicode and vector fonts have been part of all operating systems for at least 15 years. Mac OS X 10.0 that came out in 2000 and ran on 128 MB of RAM and a slow by modern standards single-core G3? It supported both these things with ease. Windows has also had W versions of all API functions that accept strings, and supported TrueType fonts, for as long as I remember. (For example, MessageBoxA accepts char* in the current system encoding, like cp1251 for Cyrillic, and MessageBoxW accepts wchar_t* which is UTF-16.) So, no, it's most definitely not that. It's most likely the fact that people use too much abstraction to achieve simple things.

anyfoo 6y ago

Imagine losing all your work because a stray pointer in your word processor mistakenly pointed to a hardware register. Imagine not being able to upgrade the hardware or even the software, because programs access hardware directly and directly interact with internal OS data structures. Imagine having to essentially restart the computer and go through minutes of loading time to look something up in another piece of software. I'm a big retro computing enthusiast, and I'm not happy about the current state of abstractions (especially with web stuff), but there's definitely been advancements also.

grishka 6y ago
Virtual memory and memory protection are good things, there's no denying that. As are operating systems with clearly defined APIs, drivers, and a clean separation between kernel space and user space. But I would still say that even with those problems present, old software does feel quite a bit more reliable than the modern one. Things generally don't break themselves because they've auto-updated while you weren't looking. And UI doesn't change on its own because there's a thousand server-side toggles for A/B tests. Old software generally was made as a tool, it served its users. Modern software is made to pursue its developer's own agenda first and foremost.
- anyfoo 6y ago
  I'd be careful whether you're not looking at things through nostalgia-colored glasses, as humans are well known to do. Computers crashed and exhibited data loss all the time back then. PCs came with very prominent reset buttons, and when both Linux and Windows NT came up, the prospect that you could run your machine for an entire day without having to reboot was a revelation. It wasn't different on 8 bit micros: My C64 was very easy to upset, and I bet most people turned it off and back on to get it into a known state when switching programs, instead of risking that the previous software left some interfering bits somewhere. Sure, it was easy to power cycle a C64 and took mere seconds, but it was also very necessary. Well into the 90s there was a strong general attitude of having to reset every now and then just to keep things from diverging too badly. Computers crashing, hanging, and losing data was so ubiquitous that it was part of mainstream humor much more than it is now. Then, towards the end of the 90s, when things started to get better, people were so proud of uptime, that they used to brag about it in forums and chats. Nowadays, my computers, smart phones and similar devices usually run for weeks, pretty much only rebooting for software updates. That isn't always the case, but it's certainly orders of magnitudes better than the very fragile balance back then.
  - grishka 6y ago
    Don't get me wrong, modern technology is superior in many ways. The problem I'm picking on here is that of the conflict of interest between the users and the developers. And this is absolutely not helped by the proliferation of predatory code signing and governments always siding with corporations when people try to take matter into their own hands. The problem with modern technology is that many of its upsides are compensated by software developers. You know, "disks are big, networks are fast, memory is plentiful, you don't need to count CPU cycles in $year" kind of mentality. > Nowadays, my computers, smart phones and similar devices usually run for weeks, pretty much only rebooting for software updates. On my macbook, something is leaking memory. I'm suspecting the nvidia GPU driver. I have to reboot it every week or two or else it'll start freezing even while I'm typing something.
ddingus 6y ago
Interestingly, one could run multiple instances of retro computers and their environments and get many of those advances. Just a random thought.
- grishka 6y ago
  Actually yes, by running retro software in an emulator on a modern system you're getting mostly best of both worlds.

retrac 6y ago

Much of it is a tradeoff between features, generality and bloat. A good chunk of that gigabyte of RAM to render a webpage goes into stuff like vector font rendering so it can display nicely at any size on any display. And Unicode handling so it can display Chinese and Russian as well as English. I suppose both outline fonts and Unicode are bloaty in their own right; such allegations have been leveled against them before. Still, those sort of features come with pretty significant cost and are largely invisible until you need them.

grishka 6y ago
I am Russian, I know this whole encoding problem first-hand. I'm genuinely envious to people who can get by with just a single Latin-script keyboard layout. Unicode and vector fonts have been part of all operating systems for at least 15 years. Mac OS X 10.0 that came out in 2000 and ran on 128 MB of RAM and a slow by modern standards single-core G3? It supported both these things with ease. Windows has also had W versions of all API functions that accept strings, and supported TrueType fonts, for as long as I remember. (For example, MessageBoxA accepts char* in the current system encoding, like cp1251 for Cyrillic, and MessageBoxW accepts wchar_t* which is UTF-16.) So, no, it's most definitely not that. It's most likely the fact that people use too much abstraction to achieve simple things.