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I can’t tell if it’s just simple nostalgia, but I feel it too. I got my first Mac when I was in 4th grade in 1994. (A Performa 630CD, which is so slow that I a

I can’t tell if it’s just simple nostalgia, but I feel it too. I got my first Mac when I was in 4th grade in 1994. (A Performa 630CD, which is so slow that I assume my AirPods have an order of magnitude more computational power.) By god I loved that thing. And I think in part it’s because I could poke at it. You could fiddle around inside the System Folder. You could modify application resources with ResEdit. You could really dig in and see all the files, and then probably accidentally ruin something, but still, you could do it. And you simply cannot do that on an iOS device outside of jailbreaking, and increasingly you cannot do that with SIP and other security measures on macOS. Which is probably for the best, for obvious security reasons. But I feel like I miss that joy of exploration…

PortiaBerries 4y ago
The first app I opened up was ResEdit; the jack-in-the-box gave me a big wave of nostalgia... But yeah, it's hard to separate fond memories of youth from the changes in computing. Plus when I was a kid learning HyperTalk and then C on System 7 it was all for fun; no one was asking anything of me. Now my coding supports my family; I haven't done any coding for fun since a few years ago when I took a sabbatical from my SDE job and worked half-time as a farm hand.
layer8 4y ago
It was a uniformly designed tool and simple enough that you could feel to have full control over. Nowadays not so much, either because of walled-garden aspirations (Windows, macOS) and/or increasing complexity and fracturedness (on Linux for example the whole X/Wayland, DE, GUI toolkits, hi-DPI and font rendering mess, package managers vs. snap/flatpak and containers, …).