Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

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> except it was a little harder to get a hold of people

Hmm. Really? Few call centres or queuing systems around yet. My bank had a local number that was answered in 3 rings - often by the same person. So did the phone and electric companies, and the tax office. They might actually remember you.

I probably couldn't ping a friend if they were out with the dog, or on holiday, and definitely not in the car - few had mobiles yet, though by the end of the 90s they were getting common enough.

A lot of things were indeed simpler as we've added needless complexity to loads of things. Adding complexity layers seems to be how we solve everything. Even politics was simpler - note I don't say better.

Then again a lot of things were fairly crap - VHS recorders, CRT TV, cassettes.

Computing was much more fun - far many more platforms - SunOS, Amiga, ST, PC, Apple, BeOS, etc, and it was still feasible to know all of the thing. Now it's more likely to be a small part of a much more complex whole, too big for an individual. That speaks of maturing, but also of over-complexity.

Swings and roundabouts really.

Easier to get hold of a human at a corporation. Harder to get hold of your friends when they were out of the house.

This.

I've often thought the main difference between us humans and other animals is that we come up with "complex" (not necessarily better or worse) solutions for our problems, even when those problems are also common in animals (e.g. hunger, mating, thirst, etc.)

Animals seem to find the shortest path: if a lion is hungry, it hunts a deer. But we have made this task [somewhat unnecessarily] complex: there are tons of foods available, each with a number of cooking methods, and thousands of combinations of those foods to sit on our table. Suddenly it's not about hunger anymore, rather it becomes another need (e.g. seeking variety) that arises due to our complexity-loving minds.

Complexity led us to build civilizations, but it also brought about more complicated new problems (e.g. air pollution). Complexity also consumes vast amounts of energy. With our limited power and time, this means extra complexity actually hurts our lives, leaving us with little energy (mental/physical) for ourselves. In my opinion, the most successful people just know the threshold/type of complexity they need in their lives.

Cassettes? We had CDs before the 1990s, thankyouverymuch.

Course we did, but a CD in the car? I think that had to wait until about the millennium. Tapes were still hugely popular through the 90s, even pre-recorded. Never did understand that as pre-recorded tapes had abysmal quality compared to home taping. :)

CD players in cars were extremely common by the mid 90s.

I even had an MP3 cd player in 98 or 99.

Yeah, I had a factory CD player in my 1994 Mustang GT, and IIRC it was standard starting the year before that.

I had a CD player in my 1994 Nissan Sentra.

I insisted on the richer, warmer sound of in-car vinyl.

You laugh, but:

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/record-play...

In retrospect things seem simpler because you know how they turn out.

I feel fairly safe in the assertion that DOS was simpler than Windows 10.

Pretty sure my mum would disagree.

My grandpa would agree, I think. DOS is way easier to teach by rote, and is a much more consistent experience than a modern operating system.

You clearly never tried setting up packet based TCP/IP on a network of DOS computers utilising multiple brands (and in the case of 3com, different chipsets) of network cards.

Simpler for what it does? It's an unfair comparison. You could say that walking is simpler than flying, but that's not true if you're trying to get from New York to Beijing.

That is still true if you are trying to get from New York to Beijing. There is waaaay more chance that something will break in your ability to fly to Beijing than in your ability to walk there.

What? No, you would drown if you tried to walk there. I'd say that's about as broken as it gets. What are you talking about?

You can probably store all the information computers stored at the beginning of 90s on a single server today. That's how simpler 90s were.

I definitely think computers have gotten better since the '90s. Mostly because of the very real scarcity at the time. Unfortunately the last 5 years have been mostly a wash with cpu, memory, storage and gpus not getting better as before. And that seems largely true of phones and software as well.

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