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Comment by speedplane | Hacker News Reader

> Every time I consider the simplicity of computing in the early 90s (when I was a kid) I have a pang of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a very subjective thing. Today, people fondly reminisce their first BASIC application or developing their first program that created a network socket. In the future, the old hats may look back longingly over setting up their first multi-server cluster or modifying an app to take advantage of parallelism or a GPU. Nostalgia isn't going anywhere.

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Personally I think nostalgia is a proxy for a generalized desire for simplicity. Most people don't long for the days of swapping out 10 different floppy disks to install an operating system, or of messing around with IRQ/DMA and UART settings to get a modem configured. It's the simple things (like BASIC) that are remembered and missed.

As someone who started young with computers in the 80s you are right.

I miss the simplicity of the first programs I wrote.

I don’t miss a single thing about the hardware.

I’ll take dual 4K displays hooked up to a fast reliable machine over any of my previous machines.

Modern machines are simpler to build, vastly faster, vastly more reliable and vastly cheaper, they win on every metric imo.

I miss my Commodore 64 hardware. I can still feel the clack of the keys.

I think nostalgia is more complicated than simply a desire for simplicity, though that may be a part of it - and not just because things were more simple back then, but because we didn't understand the complexity as children. Like those people who don't want politics in media/art even though there always has been, they just didn't know as a kid.

Maybe something like a cheap Chromebook that boots into something like BASIC where it's easy to write simple PRINT and GOTO based programs, draw stuff on the screen, and beep and boop the sound card.

It's having access to simple and easily composable basic elements, like Legos, that made computing so accessible back in the day. Computer gaming was my big motivation.

So, this simple platform also needs a decent collection of fun and hackable games, and other useful applications.

Or just boot into Emacs - which one can do e.g. via https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

Emacs is great. It's got a calendar and a web browser and even comes with a text editor. What else do you need from a desktop?

I like this idea. Sounds a bit like the PocketCHIP but scaled up to a normal size laptop.

You could actually implement this using low-end Chromebooks as a platform, just flash them with whatever simplified OS you are using. It would be a great tool for teaching programming basics.

Reminds me of Pharo Smalltalk VM or Lisp Machines. There is something powerful about the whole OS utilizing single language and allowing you to interact with and alter everything.

I'd agree with that. I want a new DOS really badly. Not something with DOS's archaicness and limitations of course, but the modern version of a system that simple.

I mostly remember everything being expensive. Today if I want to learn a new language I just download it an start working. Back when I started you had to put your hand in your pocket for everything.

I was able to write long novels as a child in DOS programs. I was never able to focus on word processing in a windowed environment. Full-screen “distraction-free” writing utilities attempt to recapture the simplicity of the old days....but it still just isn’t the same as WordPerfect.

There's always DOSbox

I call bs. The cost of entry to get to basic used to be turning the computer on. If you had one, you did this every time you used it.

Contrast with modern computers. Even the raspberry pi environment offers a ton more.

I picked up turtle geometry the other day and realize I don't have an obvious place to try the stuff they are doing. Which feels really really off.

My niece spent 30 seconds on the App Store and now has a place to write and run python scripts on her iPhone.

Cost to entry was basically zero.

I'm curious to know what she is using. Allowing access to the app store is not something I'm encouraging, for what feels like obvious reasons.

Pythonista (http://omz-software.com/pythonista/)

Looks like the cost of entry was $9.99 ;)

Python has a built in turtle module.

Maybe someone could set up one of the little Micropython capable boards to boot into iPython. I wonder if any of the ESP32 boards have VGA or HDMI?

Edit: this should work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19943059

That is news to me. Thanks! I'll have to look more at it.

The Raspberry Pi offers a tonne more since it is trying to be everything to everyone, at least in the domain of computer education. I agree that this obscures the obvious place to start, yet it also has some benefits. For example, there are Python libraries for GPIO. While interfacing electronics projects with a 1980's vintage computer was certainly possible, it did not afford such ease.

On the flip side is RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi. The OS is pretty much stuck in the 1990's with some throwbacks to the 1980's. For example: it is easy to drop into BASIC, then write programs as you would in the early days of personal computers.

My point of bringing in the pi was that it feels closest to the computers I had growing up. Tinkering was and is the point. Most computing devices, that is not the case.

>While interfacing electronics projects with a 1980's vintage computer was certainly possible, it did not afford such ease.

One of my favorite examples of interfacing 1980s micros with electronics is 8 Bit Guy's[0] series on interfacing with LCD character with the Commodore 64's user port[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV8FbwobrKY

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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