Computer de-evolution: Awesome tech features modern computers have lost | Hacker News Reader

Computer de-evolution: Awesome tech features modern computers have lost

itworld.com

22 pointsjfruh20 comments

'jfruh is a human fulfilling the role of a bot, submitting stories from "IT World" to HN. That's not a huge big deal, but note that "IT World" has had other people in the same role pushing stories here, like 'abennett. As a result, a decent fraction of every day, there is an "IT World" story on the front page of HN (they tend to happen to hit nerves), even though "IT World" is in general not a high-quality source of tech journalism.

I flag these stories but I'm prepared to accept that I'm being irrational by doing so.

good spot. Lets hope more people flag this.

Am I the only one that misses the infamous turbo button from the old 386 computers?

The amusing irony was that it was mostly used to slow the computer down so you could run those programs that were written with a lower clock speed in mind.

One of these days, I am going to shove a modern computer into one of those retro 386 cases and wire up the turbo button just for fun...

Edit: And for anyone that would like a clicky keyboard, they are not extinct: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/

I am using one of the Unicomp Customizers right now and it really is a pleasant experience. My clicky keyboard is worth every penny that it cost me.

You should make the Turbo button "magic" (if you can figure out how to, that is).

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

The development environment on the Lisp Machines is an example of something that we've "lost", but the examples in this article either still exist, weren't that useful, or have been replaced with something better.

And Emacs or Vim can do anything and more than the editors mentioned in this article.

I recently discovered "c-x n n" to "narrow" (undo with "c-x n w" "widen") a buffer in emacs. This hides everything but the current region from view and modification. A tricky command to remember, but as with most obscure commands, if you value it you quickly remember it.

You can re-bind it to something easier to remember for you.

Yes. And even the Lisp machines from a hardware point of view are no longer necessary, since we figured out how to run functional languages on standard hardware efficiently.

From a software point of view, they are still interesting.

From a usability point of view, I miss the instant-boot of the Commodore 64.

Single page: http://www.itworld.com/print/168413

I came here to post that one of the things I miss from the old internet is single-page articles, without having to search for the print button.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard

Vim

Personally, I've long missed an old keyboard where the spacebar was split into the space key and a backspace key. I haven't seen that feature on any keyboard since, though I imagine it must be available somehow. Instead, I have a keyboard not unlike the one mentioned in the article. No extra row of function keys, but it's a heavy one with mechanical switches.

That was Compaq, wasn't it? I remember hearing about it, way back when, but I never heard anybody praise it before. Was it perhaps your first keyboard, or almost your first? I tend to type with both thumbs on the space bar, so it sounds dangerous to me.

OTOH, I don't think I ever press the space bar with the left thumb, so maybe I'm missing a trick.

You are correct. And I learned to type with my right thumb exclusively, so it was very, very useful to me.

It wasn't quite my first keyboard, though. My first was the one that came with our Apple ][ GS (and I had previously used the Apple computers at school), though I did start to learn proper typing around that time.

Even though I haven't used it for years, I still use my right thumb exclusively when pressing the spacebar.

Another interesting thing we had in the 80's were intelligent peripherals. A Commodore or Atari floppy disk drive is a computer in itself, running its own software and attached to the computer through a serial communications channel. In the case of the Atari, at least, you could daisy-chain devices off the serial bus in a sort of a network.

Doesn't Firewire also allow this?

OK. There are still some computers with Firewire ports.

Statelessness.

When I wanted to edit a text file on my Apple II, I booted it with Magic Window (later, Appleworks). When I wanted to play Airhead, I booted it with the game disk. There was nothing a text editor or a game could do that would carry over to the next reboot.

If you still want to slice up a document (or multiple documents) as many times as you need, just use vim w/ :split and :vsplit. Works like a charm!

Or emacs C-x 2.

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