I also can't casually send the customer a text telling them their car is ready or have my supervisor look at my metrics on what I'm doing with the machine. Or a million other things on these old systems. Or you can, sorta, by shoehorning in garbage like analog modems and swapping out floppies all the time, but who wants to do that?
I think young people tend to fetishize old tech because they weren't there when it was used. Floppy failures were common, IRQ issues, programs taking down the entire OS, no real security, and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless. Now its been vastly democratized and has higher levels of ease of use. That comes at the cost of complexity.
productivity
^
| old, complicated /-
| tools /---
| /---
| /--
| /---
| /---
| /---
| /--
| /---
| /--- /-------------------------
+----------/-------------- modern, pretty
| /--- "tools"
| /---
|--
---------------------------------------------------->
experience
> and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless
You say as if this was a bug. It's a feature. This is the fact for any kind of complex, powerful tool - whether it's a combine harvester or furnace or industrial laser cutter - takes traning to use to its full power. Making software easy to use fully from the get-go only means making it not do much.
False dichotomy. It is absolutely possible to write modern mass-market software and also offer complex functionality that wouldn't be needed by the average user. It is good practice from a UX perspective to avoid surfacing advanced features unless the user is actively looking for them (in your example, that's the experienced user).
I like the graph, though.
Back before people started spreading wrong ideas like this, we had things like HyperCard, which were both easy-to-learn and extremely powerful.
Now we don't, because people like you seem to think the entire concept is impossible. It's not. It never was.
I disagree. I once worked on a telephone switchboard, using a old text based interface and a specially designed keyboard with dedicated buttons for all the functions. It took a few minutes to learn what the buttons did. Everything was fast and responsive, and there were no distractions on screen.
I later worked there again after they had "upgraded" to a modern Windows based system. This was far more difficult and slower to use and it did nothing the old system couldn't. Training somebody to push a dedicated button is easier than training somebody to use a GUI. Look at the interfaces people use at fast food restaurants. There's a huge array of dedicated buttons, and it takes very little skill to operate. The only advantage of GUIs over dedicated hardware UIs is lower cost.
Also you can abstract away your GUI interface with a hardware button if preferred. I'm using a hardware keyboard to type this for example, even though this computer has a touch screen. I have this flexibility and customization options that the old school approach didn't really have.
I can't type shit on any OSK without looking at the keys, or being supported by some spellchecker. But i can type this without looking down because i know when i hit a key etc.
You sound young to me. Back in the 80s, computers were quite reliable, they just couldn't do that much. Floppies were extremely reliable; they had to be because the computers back then ran entirely on floppies. Only really expensive computers had hard drives until the very late 80s. It wasn't until the mid/late 90s that floppy drives became unreliable, because everyone stopped using them for anything except Windows drivers and the manufacturing of them (both drives and disks) went to low-cost areas and the quality went down the tubes. IRQ issues were a problem with DOS and Windows machines with ISA cards; before that on things like C=64s, there was no such thing. Security wasn't a problem back then, because no one was connected to a network; the best they had was telephone modems to connect to Compu$erve or BBSes. Viruses started becoming a real problem when everyone moved to DOS and downloaded stuff from BBSes. Back in the Apple ][ and C=64 days, security was unnecessary. Even over on the Internet-connected UNIX side (something mainly only used by college people, not by people with C=64s), security didn't become a big issue until Morris's worm in 1988.
As for CLI taking longer to learn, perhaps, but I remember office secretaries using DOS just fine, unlike these days where everyone has no clue what to do with a command line and is terrified of it. They might not have done really advanced stuff, but learning a few DOS commands like COPY and MOVE and DEL really isn't that hard for someone with half a brain.
As for "standardization", I don't know where you get that idea. Tons of people are having all kinds of problems with their Windows software not working on Windows 10, older peripherals not working on Win10, etc. How long did it finally take us to have some standardization on the web, after dealing with IE6 for so long? We didn't have these problems back in the text-only days. And again, over on the UNIX side, they had much better attempts at standardization with the X protocol, which allowed remote GUI access between completely different UNIX OSes, in the 80s. It took ages for anything similar to arrive on Windows machines.
What you can do with a couple MHz and a few hundred KB of memory is great, given a little ingenuity. Of course, you aren't going to do real-time face recognition on something like that, but 99% of what we need to do is just fine with 0.1% of the performance.
So if we are still playing catch up with those environments, is just because the industry at large lacks the political agenda to push forward such technologies, and nothing to do with technical capabilities.
That said, I think the C64 thing is pretty neat, so I can't really knock it.
I remember - way, way back - using a graphics editor app on a computer with the following specs: 3.5 MHz, 8 bit, 48 kB RAM. It was not more complex than Microsoft Paint, but it worked.
So, yeah, microcontrollers nowadays were considered computers at some point in the past.
The CPU part of a microcontroller, sure. But a microcontroller is more than just a computer: it's specifically designed for controlling things, and as such ahs a lot of extra parts added on which you would not normally find on a general-purpose computer or CPU/microprocessor. Things like comparators, timers, GPIO (general-purpose input/output) pins, A/D and D/A converters are common on uCs, and these days they frequently have industrial data buses added in too, like CAN (usually used in cars). These of course could all be added to a general-purpose computer, but in a uC, they're all built right onto the chip, and are accessible right at the register level instead of having to communicate over a general-purpose bus to some external module.
But if you meant to say that a modern microcontroller is as powerful as a full-fledged "computer" from the 80s, that's definitely true, and really a big understatement as many modern microcontrollers have rather powerful ARM or PowerPC CPU cores and are far more powerful than your typical 1980s microcomputer. uCs these days span an incredible range, from tiny PICs with a few hundred words of flash and a few dozen words of RAM, running at 1MHz, up to very powerful 64-bit SoCs (systems-on-chip) running at well over 1GHz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX
I played around with one recently and it's a pretty cool little device.