Comment by ReactiveJelly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ReactiveJelly | Hacker News Reader

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> Now emulation I can get behind

Makes sense. Other than perhaps latency, if software was truly better in previous decades, you can just run old software on new hardware [1] and get the best of both worlds. Given infinite time, you could probably find a way to boot directly into some kind of hypervisor that runs RiscOS or whatever full-screen. While also running LVM underneath it for online backups. Oops, a new software feature.

It's related to my pet peeve about Gemini: You can just choose to do all the stuff Gemini does with your own safe subset of HTTPS. If you have the political power and dev hours to maintain Gemini, you can also just maintain HTTP/1.1 with TLS.

Running Acorn hardware won't fix software bloat created by anyone but yourself, and running Gemini won't fix HTTP bloat created by anyone but yourself. Might as well run good software on good hardware, instead of running bad protocols or bad hardware out of spite.

[1] I'm on the young end of millennials, so my nostalgia is for Windows XP. But there's a valley for retro nostalgia - It's okay to use modern Linux, because you need security patches. It's okay to use Windows 10 because your employer forces it. It's okay to run an Amiga or RiscOS ironically, because it's cool and funny. But Windows XP? No! Evil security hazard! Deprecation means the software became bad overnight! Why won't you upgrade??

As a fellow young millennial doing red team security stuff professionally, XP is different from the others for a few reasons.

The first is that XP has a tendency to, by default, open a lot of forward facing holes and services that to my knowledge most other "old timey" OSes don't. I'm not familiar with riscos or amigaos, but I do know old versions of OS X ship with basically no attack surface, while XP (IIRC) will enable SMB and guest access automatically.

The second is that unlike those other OSes, XP was and is very widely used, and there are exploits which target XP and a range of other commonly used Windows machines. Unlike basically any other niche retro hardware, Windows is both 1) pervasively networked and 2) very widely attacked, and lacks basically any modern mitigation for exploits, so a simple buffer overflow in a networked service can easily become a RCE.

> and running Gemini won't fix HTTP bloat created by anyone but yourself

No, but it does help building a community of like-minded people. And that is really the core idea of gemini, isolationism is sort of a feature there. I see gemini more like a flag under which people can rally under, the technical aspects are incidental.

(note: I don't use/run gemini so I might be mis-representing them here)

Windows operating systems may themselves represent the 'pivot points' that wenc talks about. Every so often, a version of Windows seems to come along that gives you a genuine improvement over what came before - in my view Windows 98 SE, Windows XP and Windows 7 for example, which may represent the nostalgia valleys. Other intermediate versions seem to at best introduce new problems to replace the old ones.

Of course, it would be great to have the Risc OS experience while doing modern computing tasks, so I'm pleased to hear that the lessons it brought to the world have not been forgotten.

I'm inclined to agree, but I do think that 95 needs to be on that list as well simply because it was such a massive step up from the MS-DOS plus Windows 3.1/3.11 era. 98 itself was a bit of a misstep, but I do agree 98SE was the next major improvement point.

Perhaps I'm a bit biased against 95 as I was happily using Risc OS at the time :) My memory of Microsoft from back then was that the Office apps could be quite capable, but the underlying OS was just something you had to put up with.

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