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While I agree that dead trees and e-ink are far superior to reading in a terminal, it's not so bad, even with aging eyes. In some ways is kind of soothing, as

While I agree that dead trees and e-ink are far superior to reading in a terminal, it's not so bad, even with aging eyes. In some ways is kind of soothing, as long as you have the brightness and contrast set appropriately. Back when the internet was all text, there were people in the UK who would transcribe their favorite television shows into text files. UUCPing or cating these scripts into a local machine was the only source of British humor in some parts of the world. I read the entirety of Red Dwarf as fan-transcribed text files on a terminal 15 years before I was able to see it in video.

throwanem 4y ago
As a kid in my sophomore year of high school, I read the whole 3.0.0 Jargon File on the 15" CRT of my 386 - in Turbo Pascal, because it was the only thing I had that could open so large a file. (A whole megabyte! I messed around with building an index and a per-entry viewer, but never got very far because my motivation was limited by being able to just read the file directly.) I'd "borrowed" the Turbo Pascal installer via an understanding undergrad at the local college, who was perfectly eager to help expand my horizons; the Jargon File came by way of the shovelware directories that old video game magazine cover CDs used to have. Poor as I would later come to know it to be, it was still my first real exposure to the idea of a subculture built around computers and their use, and the first thing that gave me to realize that there might be a larger social context into which my until then small-town and very solitary style of weirdness might fit - which I like to think was more or less what the fellow nerds who put together the CD master had in mind. (That, and maybe a bit of "how you gonna keep him down on the farm?" puckishness...) I wouldn't want to go back to just reading from a CRT, though. Phone screens being as far from ideal as they are, they're still much better at rendering text, and considerably wieldier especially in bed.

throwanem 4y ago

As a kid in my sophomore year of high school, I read the whole 3.0.0 Jargon File on the 15" CRT of my 386 - in Turbo Pascal, because it was the only thing I had that could open so large a file. (A whole megabyte! I messed around with building an index and a per-entry viewer, but never got very far because my motivation was limited by being able to just read the file directly.) I'd "borrowed" the Turbo Pascal installer via an understanding undergrad at the local college, who was perfectly eager to help expand my horizons; the Jargon File came by way of the shovelware directories that old video game magazine cover CDs used to have. Poor as I would later come to know it to be, it was still my first real exposure to the idea of a subculture built around computers and their use, and the first thing that gave me to realize that there might be a larger social context into which my until then small-town and very solitary style of weirdness might fit - which I like to think was more or less what the fellow nerds who put together the CD master had in mind. (That, and maybe a bit of "how you gonna keep him down on the farm?" puckishness...) I wouldn't want to go back to just reading from a CRT, though. Phone screens being as far from ideal as they are, they're still much better at rendering text, and considerably wieldier especially in bed.