>software had to not only be downloaded, but it had to be hand built against each operating system Back in the day, we didn't even have modems or compilers, le

>software had to not only be downloaded, but it had to be hand built against each operating system Back in the day, we didn't even have modems or compilers, let alone internet - so we would go to Ye Olde Computer Store and copy the disks of Fred Fish. That was how I got my first experience of Hack, which was great, and Emacs, which has always been a WTF for me. I wonder if for some reason computer hardware had stopped getting faster and more complex at the stage of, say, a 25 MHz 486, how much different the world would be, or whether it would just force software to be consistently purged of cruft.