> The disappearance of OS and program configurability, for example, isn't something you notice or even think about if you're not coming from a place where every

> The disappearance of OS and program configurability, for example, isn't something you notice or even think about if you're not coming from a place where everything once used to be configurable. I once became determined to repurpose one of the serial port chips in a Mac so that it sent and received at the 31.Kbps MIDI data rate. Doing that required a certain undocumented incantation with a magic value. I managed to deduce it thanks to an assembly program it took me a week to find in an old magazine. That value was sent to the chip from 'FreeBASIC' ... which could then, viola, send MIDI bytes out the port without needing external hardware. At the time I bitched a lot about that being made so hard to do. Little did I suspect.