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I'm gonna go with an emphatic NO on this one: - Buying software, especially computer games for Windows 95/98 was a complete gamble. Maybe one third just worked

I'm gonna go with an emphatic NO on this one: - Buying software, especially computer games for Windows 95/98 was a complete gamble. Maybe one third just worked, one third required Direct X/Soundcard Driver/Graphic/Bios fiddling to get something running (though crashes were frequent), one third just outright never worked at all. - Web Development was an endless nightmare of IE6 compatibility, tables with eight separate pngs around an element to create a drop shadow, clearfixes and floatfixes, polyfills and fallbacks. - SVN/Turtoise version control was constantly corrupted or in some dodgy state. Different line endings or upper/lowercase filenames could get files stuck and unrecoverable. - So much (and I mean SOOO MUCH) money was spent on buying and maintaining the serverroom (no cloud, remember) - so you had to buy and amateurishly maintain all this super expensive hardware - usually on a standard, off-the shelf T1 line connection to the internet. - CD-ROMs got scratched, files got corrupted if your computer crashed during saving - You spent eight hours a day in front of a giant, non-flatscreen cathode monitor that blasted your eyes with light and radiation, making you look properly stoned when you came home. ... I could go on and on... but honestly, stuff got soo much better over time, especially in tech. Sure, there are downsides (lootbox/micro-transactions in games, expensive software subscriptions for what's essentially static products (I'm looking at you here, my 59$/month Adobe CC abo) etc. - but overall, tech is much, much better today as it was 20 or 30 years ago. Now - when it comes to social interactions and interpersonal communication, I am less sure...

Fnoord 5y ago
> I'm gonna go with an emphatic NO on this one: The point of the post is that its two steps forward, one step backwards. Not that everything used to be better back in the days. There's countless of examples why the tech world is better today. HTTPS alone makes it more difficult for a MITM attack, for example, but its not a panacea. > Buying software, especially computer games for Windows 95/98 was a complete gamble. Maybe one third just worked, one third required Direct X/Soundcard Driver/Graphic/Bios fiddling to get something running (though crashes were frequent), one third just outright never worked at all. That's why I worked with references, so I'd read a review in a magazine, or learn from a friend which hardware was stable. For example, I used a Plextor CDRW which used SCSI. This lead to massively less buffer underflows. > You spent eight hours a day in front of a giant, non-flatscreen cathode monitor that blasted your eyes with light and radiation, making you look properly stoned when you came home. Radiation from CRT monitors was harmful?
rixed 5y ago
I kind of agree with most of this. The question was not "don't you think the past was better", but rather "If you could revive something from the past, what would you pick?"
ASalazarMX 5y ago
> - So much (and I mean SOOO MUCH) money was spent on buying and maintaining the serverroom (no cloud, remember) - so you had to buy and amateurishly maintain all this super expensive hardware - usually on a standard, off-the shelf T1 line connection to the internet. This is not a thing of the past, migrating everything to the cloud is not advantageous to everyone. Even if it still does, you still are left with (edge) servers to maintain.

Fnoord 5y ago

> I'm gonna go with an emphatic NO on this one: The point of the post is that its two steps forward, one step backwards. Not that everything used to be better back in the days. There's countless of examples why the tech world is better today. HTTPS alone makes it more difficult for a MITM attack, for example, but its not a panacea. > Buying software, especially computer games for Windows 95/98 was a complete gamble. Maybe one third just worked, one third required Direct X/Soundcard Driver/Graphic/Bios fiddling to get something running (though crashes were frequent), one third just outright never worked at all. That's why I worked with references, so I'd read a review in a magazine, or learn from a friend which hardware was stable. For example, I used a Plextor CDRW which used SCSI. This lead to massively less buffer underflows. > You spent eight hours a day in front of a giant, non-flatscreen cathode monitor that blasted your eyes with light and radiation, making you look properly stoned when you came home. Radiation from CRT monitors was harmful?

rixed 5y ago

I kind of agree with most of this. The question was not "don't you think the past was better", but rather "If you could revive something from the past, what would you pick?"

ASalazarMX 5y ago

> - So much (and I mean SOOO MUCH) money was spent on buying and maintaining the serverroom (no cloud, remember) - so you had to buy and amateurishly maintain all this super expensive hardware - usually on a standard, off-the shelf T1 line connection to the internet. This is not a thing of the past, migrating everything to the cloud is not advantageous to everyone. Even if it still does, you still are left with (edge) servers to maintain.