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I've still got all my machines from that era. They still work, they're still highly entertaining, and very, very useful. My kids (6 and 4 yrs) are learning to

I've still got all my machines from that era. They still work, they're still highly entertaining, and very, very useful. My kids (6 and 4 yrs) are learning to read, write, spell .. and do math .. with the same machines I used when I was 13. This just points out, to me, how arbitrary technology really is. All the energy into building that C64 is wasted if the thing ends up on the trash heap .. but dust it off today and someone, somewhere, will still find a use for it. "Where did the IDE go wrong?" I think where things went wrong is the disassociation of 'developer' from 'user' that happened as a consequence of marketing-grads getting involved in the business of computers. I've never considered an OS truly 'user friendly' if it doesn't ship with everything on board that a person would need to build applications for it - and that is something the BASIC guys did well, back in the day. (Which is why I think that things like LOAD81 are so darn cool .. ;) http://github.com/antirez/load81 http://github.com/antirez/load81)

zokier 12y ago
> I think where things went wrong is the disassociation of 'developer' from 'user' that happened as a consequence of marketing-grads getting involved in the business of computers Somehow this happened to happen at the same time when computer users rose from 1% of populace to vast majority. We probably ended up with more "developer" guys this way.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Its difficult to really say, but you may be 'right' in the sense that the more people you throw at something, the greater the variety of skill set you have to accommodate. In the early days, "only nerds used computers" - and now look at us. Still, I blame the tools vendors for not making it viable to include developer-style applications as a basic default built-in - certainly not true of most OS's, except 'those built for consumers'. Imagine if we'd had the temerity, we nerds, to demand that the dev tools be treated as 1st-class applications in the OS/execution environment? I suppose we'd all be using Lisp machines, eh? :P

zokier 12y ago

> I think where things went wrong is the disassociation of 'developer' from 'user' that happened as a consequence of marketing-grads getting involved in the business of computers Somehow this happened to happen at the same time when computer users rose from 1% of populace to vast majority. We probably ended up with more "developer" guys this way.

fit2rule 12y ago
Its difficult to really say, but you may be 'right' in the sense that the more people you throw at something, the greater the variety of skill set you have to accommodate. In the early days, "only nerds used computers" - and now look at us. Still, I blame the tools vendors for not making it viable to include developer-style applications as a basic default built-in - certainly not true of most OS's, except 'those built for consumers'. Imagine if we'd had the temerity, we nerds, to demand that the dev tools be treated as 1st-class applications in the OS/execution environment? I suppose we'd all be using Lisp machines, eh? :P