5 ms·

The benefits/downsides of the modern user experience. Way back in the day, your odds of successfully using a computer were terribly low, without getting entang

by retrac 5y ago

The benefits/downsides of the modern user experience. Way back in the day, your odds of successfully using a computer were terribly low, without getting entangled in-depth in the technical details of how the computer worked. Editing text configuration files, wrangling with file systems, memory layouts and protection, hardware drivers, even patching binary executables with hex editors sometimes! All common experiences in the 1980s and 1990s. If you did anything more than run WordPerfect or SimCity (and often even then) it was basically unavoidable that you learned at least a bit about fairly low-level aspects of the machine you were using. Of course the fact that nothing worked well enough you had to do that was frustrating, but it probably also taught some useful skills and intuitions.

bsedlm 5y ago
I think we were at a sweetspot around the 2000s... The windows XP era. But this is most likely my own familiarity bias?
- dunnevens 5y ago
  Determining the sweet spot is a fun thought. I'd argue for the Windows 7 era. General purpose computing is still the norm. The web & apps have almost as many services as now, but with less bloat and less tracking. There's social media but it's not completely dominant. Linux for desktop is beginning to be in good shape. Smartphones are available for those who want them but they're not dominant yet either. That's my personal one. I'm sure it'll be different for everyone else.
  - MarcScott 5y ago
    Windows 7 was the first time I installed a Windows OS and didn't have to custom install a bunch of drivers, it was all just done for me. I doubt most people, with the exception of builders of custom rigs, even know that a driver is a thing.
- asdff 5y ago
  I think it was before that to be honest. I grew up in that era and gui mentality was tough to overcome. The cli was a black box for me for years. Once I learned bash I felt like I knew exactly how a computer worked and how a text file could turn into a 3d video game. Before that it was black magic.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    GUI computers still lets you do all of that though. The main damage the switch to smartphones has is that they severely limit what you are allowed to do with your computer, you cannot properly tinker with them even if you want to.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  I think the sweet spot was people growing up in the time that their early experience spanned the DOS & 8-bit era into the ubiquity of GUIs (say mid-1980s to mid-1990s), which may reflect my own familiarity bias though I was technically a little earlier than that.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    I'll second that. Saw some early PC and even wrote a basic Basic program in, must have been math class in the gymnasium (~"high school", class 10-12), but really started using computers at university in 1985 -- first a minicomputer with TTY (and even some printing!) terminals in 1985, then PCs a year or so later. First with a colourful menu system (Press 1 for DisplayWriter, 2 for MINITAB, etc) [1], then Windows 3 a year or so after that. My son, recently of age, has no fucking idea about anything beneath the GUI. OTOH, my somewhat older stepson is a games and recently "full stack" -- which has something to do with tis newfangled Web thingy, I think -- programmer. (OTGH, fuck knows what he knows of anything beneath Unity and React...) ___ [1]: That is, press a number and then [Enter]. This, I later (after some rudimentary hints on DOS from a classmate) found out, called the batch files 1.BAT, 2.BAT, etc, which in turn set up whatever needed to be set up and then started the respective application.
- rchaud 5y ago
  I worked at a computer helpdesk in college during this time. Cleaning up malware transmitted via email, IE6 and AIM made up the lion's share of my work. In my experience, students understood computers a LOT better after being told that their term paper is not recoverable from their busted HDD, and that they should be saving their work on the network drive in future.
UI_at_80x24 5y ago
This is precisely why "we" know it and neither our parents or children do. We were forced to do it just to make it work the way we wanted. It was necessary. Hell, even semi-regular routine of formatting [the hard-drive] and reinstalling Windows because it was getting slow; taught a lot of people the simple basics. All of that is lost today. Factory reset -> input email & password -> sit back while everything reinstalls. What do you learn from that other then to make sure you had a backup of your data.
- sigg3 5y ago
  Reinstalling windows was domain knowledge on a per PC basis, in my experience. I had a draft UDMA/66 port on which I wanted my MASTER IDE (for performance), but Windows would not install on anything above UDMA/33. It would run fine once installed, however. The procedure was straight forward, but IDEs didn't announce its presence, instead there were manual MASTER/SLAVE jumpers on the drive themselves that would have to line up with the manually configured BIOS settings. Once Windows was installed, everything had to be physically pulled out, ports and cables changed, jumpers and BIOS checked or configured, enabling UDMA/66 (and thus disabling the 2nd IDE port, but not 3 and 4) and you could start using the OS. And Windows installation would BSOD with the network card in, so that would have to be added later but before downloading the necessary WaReZ. I also got into Linux at the very end of the 2.4 line, and vividly recall how everything changed to be more user-friendly with the 2.6 series of kernels.
- DigitallyFidget 5y ago
  Automobiles were very much the same. When they first started coming out, you really had to be a mechanic to own one. Autoshops/garages weren't a thing in the beginning. PCs were the same way. These days there's tons of auto shops and PC repair shops. You don't need to know a single thing about how a car or PC operates, you just take it to a shop when it has problems and have someone else fix it. If an individual wants to learn, they only need to pop the hood, look inside the machine, and check out tutorials and videos on youtube. Plenty of people grew up with computers and never learned a thing about how they worked, they'd just have someone else who knew about them fix their problems. We weren't forced to learn about them or had to, we chose to. That choice applies today as much as it did 25 years ago when I had to have my dad fix my computer for me. I just happened to want to learn how he did it and how to do it myself.
shakezula 5y ago
> anything more than run WordPerfect or SimCity (and often even then) Oh for sure, this gave me nostalgia of cracking pirated SimCity ISOs I had downloaded on Kazaa or Limewire or whatever it was that week. Cracking ISOs with key breakers, patching DLL files, etc... all taught me a lot about how programs worked at a really young age.
Grustaf 5y ago
> Editing text configuration files, wrangling with file systems, memory layouts and protection, hardware drivers, even patching binary executables with hex editors sometimes! These are terrible things to have to spend time on. This comment section reads like someone missing having to set dip switches on sound cards so they don't conflict with your printer.

by retrac 5y ago

bsedlm 5y ago

I think we were at a sweetspot around the 2000s... The windows XP era. But this is most likely my own familiarity bias?

dunnevens 5y ago
Determining the sweet spot is a fun thought. I'd argue for the Windows 7 era. General purpose computing is still the norm. The web & apps have almost as many services as now, but with less bloat and less tracking. There's social media but it's not completely dominant. Linux for desktop is beginning to be in good shape. Smartphones are available for those who want them but they're not dominant yet either. That's my personal one. I'm sure it'll be different for everyone else.
- MarcScott 5y ago
  Windows 7 was the first time I installed a Windows OS and didn't have to custom install a bunch of drivers, it was all just done for me. I doubt most people, with the exception of builders of custom rigs, even know that a driver is a thing.
asdff 5y ago
I think it was before that to be honest. I grew up in that era and gui mentality was tough to overcome. The cli was a black box for me for years. Once I learned bash I felt like I knew exactly how a computer worked and how a text file could turn into a 3d video game. Before that it was black magic.
- Jensson 5y ago
  GUI computers still lets you do all of that though. The main damage the switch to smartphones has is that they severely limit what you are allowed to do with your computer, you cannot properly tinker with them even if you want to.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
dragonwriter 5y ago
I think the sweet spot was people growing up in the time that their early experience spanned the DOS & 8-bit era into the ubiquity of GUIs (say mid-1980s to mid-1990s), which may reflect my own familiarity bias though I was technically a little earlier than that.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  I'll second that. Saw some early PC and even wrote a basic Basic program in, must have been math class in the gymnasium (~"high school", class 10-12), but really started using computers at university in 1985 -- first a minicomputer with TTY (and even some printing!) terminals in 1985, then PCs a year or so later. First with a colourful menu system (Press 1 for DisplayWriter, 2 for MINITAB, etc) [1], then Windows 3 a year or so after that. My son, recently of age, has no fucking idea about anything beneath the GUI. OTOH, my somewhat older stepson is a games and recently "full stack" -- which has something to do with tis newfangled Web thingy, I think -- programmer. (OTGH, fuck knows what he knows of anything beneath Unity and React...) ___ [1]: That is, press a number and then [Enter]. This, I later (after some rudimentary hints on DOS from a classmate) found out, called the batch files 1.BAT, 2.BAT, etc, which in turn set up whatever needed to be set up and then started the respective application.
rchaud 5y ago
I worked at a computer helpdesk in college during this time. Cleaning up malware transmitted via email, IE6 and AIM made up the lion's share of my work. In my experience, students understood computers a LOT better after being told that their term paper is not recoverable from their busted HDD, and that they should be saving their work on the network drive in future.

UI_at_80x24 5y ago

This is precisely why "we" know it and neither our parents or children do. We were forced to do it just to make it work the way we wanted. It was necessary. Hell, even semi-regular routine of formatting [the hard-drive] and reinstalling Windows because it was getting slow; taught a lot of people the simple basics. All of that is lost today. Factory reset -> input email & password -> sit back while everything reinstalls. What do you learn from that other then to make sure you had a backup of your data.

sigg3 5y ago
Reinstalling windows was domain knowledge on a per PC basis, in my experience. I had a draft UDMA/66 port on which I wanted my MASTER IDE (for performance), but Windows would not install on anything above UDMA/33. It would run fine once installed, however. The procedure was straight forward, but IDEs didn't announce its presence, instead there were manual MASTER/SLAVE jumpers on the drive themselves that would have to line up with the manually configured BIOS settings. Once Windows was installed, everything had to be physically pulled out, ports and cables changed, jumpers and BIOS checked or configured, enabling UDMA/66 (and thus disabling the 2nd IDE port, but not 3 and 4) and you could start using the OS. And Windows installation would BSOD with the network card in, so that would have to be added later but before downloading the necessary WaReZ. I also got into Linux at the very end of the 2.4 line, and vividly recall how everything changed to be more user-friendly with the 2.6 series of kernels.
DigitallyFidget 5y ago
Automobiles were very much the same. When they first started coming out, you really had to be a mechanic to own one. Autoshops/garages weren't a thing in the beginning. PCs were the same way. These days there's tons of auto shops and PC repair shops. You don't need to know a single thing about how a car or PC operates, you just take it to a shop when it has problems and have someone else fix it. If an individual wants to learn, they only need to pop the hood, look inside the machine, and check out tutorials and videos on youtube. Plenty of people grew up with computers and never learned a thing about how they worked, they'd just have someone else who knew about them fix their problems. We weren't forced to learn about them or had to, we chose to. That choice applies today as much as it did 25 years ago when I had to have my dad fix my computer for me. I just happened to want to learn how he did it and how to do it myself.

shakezula 5y ago

> anything more than run WordPerfect or SimCity (and often even then) Oh for sure, this gave me nostalgia of cracking pirated SimCity ISOs I had downloaded on Kazaa or Limewire or whatever it was that week. Cracking ISOs with key breakers, patching DLL files, etc... all taught me a lot about how programs worked at a really young age.

Grustaf 5y ago

> Editing text configuration files, wrangling with file systems, memory layouts and protection, hardware drivers, even patching binary executables with hex editors sometimes! These are terrible things to have to spend time on. This comment section reads like someone missing having to set dip switches on sound cards so they don't conflict with your printer.