1991's PC technology was unbelievable (2011)
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
But in 1985, a PC that had capabilities comparable to the Amiga cost over 10 times as much as the Amiga: you’d need specialized graphics card to get 4096 colors at once, specialized sound cards to get 4 channel 8-bit stereo sound (or 2 channel 13-bit) - hardly any were available, and even if you got them, you didn’t ha e use for them because almost no software supported them.
The o/S did good cooperative multitasking with just 512K ram. Oh, and it ran faster than a real Mac while emulating a Mac (used the same CPU, but also had a graphics accelerator that the Mac didn’t).
In 1985.
Sound blaster (8 bit sound card) and VGA (only 256 colors at once at low resolution, and no sprites) became common around 1991-1992. It took a few more years for it until hardware better than Amiga’s 1985 debut - 16 bit Soundblasters or Gravis Ultrasound; and Extended SuperVGA cards. Still no sprite or genlock features. Win 95 was finally comparable to AmigaOS, if somewhat more buggy.
Alas, commodore was horribly mismanaged - and we are left with the PC legacy.
I figured this sort of nonsense would kill the Amiga (like what happened to the Rainbow PC), and decided to not invest in making a compiler for it.
Edit: if I recall correctly, while it had standard 3.5" diskettes, it couldn't read/write DOS disks. C'mon, guys. I don't recall what I did with the machine, probably gave it away.
For those who are unaware of the significance of this statement, Walter Bright wrote the Zortec C compiler for DOS (eventually rebranded as Symantec C) which he later extended to be the first compiler that translated C++ directly to machine code without first going through C as an intermediary language and is currently the lead author of the D programming language and its DMD compiler. This man knows compilers!
And Commodore was really horribly mismanaged at the time in every perspective.
And yet, the Amiga lived a very, very long time - i know it was still used in TV stations into the early 2000s, despite being dead for a few years at that point, and the PC world having caught up to it and surpassed it in capabilities.
Amiga hardware and software is still coming out. But it’s the afterlife now.
Except for faster CPUs, the Amiga barely changed from 1985 to 1993. The AGA machines (1200, 4000) were too little, too late.
- If you were buying a PC right after the IBM PC came out, it still wasn't obvious whether you bought an IBM PC with DOS (or one of the clones that were starting to come out) or if you bought a Z80 system running CP/M-86 (or an Apple III). I bought a PC clone in, I think 1983, but I had been shopping for a good year--those things were pricey--and it wasn't obvious when I first started shopping what the right choice was.
- None of the minicomputer makers, including DEC, really understood compatibility in the context of PCs. They were so used to making completely proprietary systems so just selling something that could run an off-the-shelf operating system already seemed like a bold concession.
DEC certainly misunderstood compatibility, but the DEC-heads certainly did. The DEC-heads were anxiously waiting for the DEC entry, and assumed it would be awesome like the PDP-11. Instead, DEC proudly introduced a crippled, incompatible PC. The DEC-heads literally laughed at it, and walked away, crushed, by what DEC had done. DEC never recovered after burning their godlike status.
DEC should have introduced a PDP-11 priced competitively with the IBM PC. That would have knocked it out of the park.
DECmate, a PDP-8 variant (12-bit), for word processing and office automation at the low end; for the DECmate II you could get a CP/M card and a graphics card as well, and I think the DECmate III had graphics built in. It ran a variant of OS/8.
DEC Rainbow, a system with both Z-80 and 8088, for general CP/M and MS-DOS software at the midrange. This was their “consumer” system. MS-DOS software that stuck to the APIs would work, anything that expected PC hardware broke.
DEC Professional, a PDP-11 variant (16-bit), as a high end workstation. It was literally a PDP-11 Qbus system, and could run RT-11 or RSTS or even UNIX. This was essentially a PDP-11 development workstation or small office server.
The single biggest problem with this strategy is the confusion caused by incompatibility, even moreso than not being PC-compatible. For example, if everything had been (one of) either PDP-8 or PDP-11 based, it would have been a strong product line: Office appliance, home computer, workstation. If everything had been based on either CP/M or MS-DOS (or both, like Rainbow), they could have potentially been a much bigger player in those markets, maybe even driving more software to target APIs rather than hardware (as NEC’s non-PC MS-DOS systems did in Japan).
Instead, well, that part of their business wound up being just another PC clone maker after a while. At least the VAXmate was innovative in being a PC-compatible that could boot over built-in Ethernet from a VAX…
If DEC had actually sold a compatible microcomputer PDP system, they might have done better commercially, but instead they used the PDP architecture to build related but incompatible systems so as to not cannibalize sales of their big iron. In that sense, they were successful, because they sold very poorly.
I like my 380 with Venix, but it's a dead end.
At the time, in high school, I drooled over the thought of having one, especially since the school had its own 11/34. In retrospect, it would have been fun but literally nobody I knew would have had one.
It's ironic that the biggest single market for home PDP-11 clones was... the Soviet Union.
Of course, the disruptive innovators were selling the whole computational environment for the same price as a VT100.
The Amiga floppy drives took standard 3.5" media, and they could read MS-DOS disks, but the software for this wasn't included with the OS until 1992.
Section 9.7 in http://www.faqs.org/faqs/amiga/introduction/part4/ says you could do this with Workbench 2.1, which was released at the end of 1992 (http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_21.html).
Of course, PC's later had double-density disks that could host 1.4MB but Amiga only ever had single-density disks in practice.
Yes, they could; software to read/write alternative formats on the PC was, well, I’m not sure how common, but it was floating around. It wasn’t a controller issue, it was a DOS format issue. Similar software was even available for the 360KB (DOS formatted capacity) 5¼” floppies on PCs before 3½” drives were available.
> Of course, PC's later had double-density disks that could host 1.4MB
“high-density”, and 1.44MB DOS formatted capacity.
> Amiga only ever had single-density disks in practice.
“double-density”; single-density 3½” disks may have existed, but I don't think anyone used them in significant numbers.
The Amiga couldn't talk to a PC screen with any amount of pin adapters anyway. It used a different frequency, which is seriously aggravating today if you want to fire up an old Amiga for nostalgia's sake.
It could read DOS discs with a driver iirc but the PC definitely couldn't read Amiga discs. It got extra capacity out of them (720k vs 880k) but at a definite cost in compatibility.
The IBM was the dominant platform, and there were plenty of 3rd party keyboards, drives, and monitors available. The keyboards, for example, had the same keys but wouldn't work with the Amiga.
Running PC programs was not important, but being able to read/write the floppies in DOS format was very important.
Amiga was clearly trying to create a proprietary platform in order to charge premium prices for keyboards, etc. I thought this was a big mistake.
Whether that killed the Amiga or not, who knows, but as far as I was concerned it was a factor. It certainly drove me away from supporting it.
This is by no means a given, considering that Apple has succeeded fantastically by not only doing exactly this, but doing so in pursuit of margins Commodore-Amiga would have considered fatally aggressive.
And monitors were always different—though you weren’t actually limited to Commodore, any 15kHz analog RGB display would work!—because resolutions were always advancing. Expecting to use (say) a CGA monitor with Amiga is just silly, it’s insufficient for the output. You could also always use composite out or an RF modulator if you really had to use a different display that wasn’t 15kHz analog RGB.
Finally, one of Commodore’s big selling points for Amiga was PC compatibility: One of the pieces of launch software was official Amiga-badged PC XT emulation software, and one of the pieces of launch hardware was a 5.25in PC-compatible floppy drive. Commodore explicitly promoted that you could exchange documents with and even run MS-DOS, unlike most other systems at the time.
I had to go hunting for this one; I didn't remember the Amiga 1000 launching with a software PC emulator, but I found what you were referring to, "Amiga Transformer"! But I confess I definitely don't remember it being a "big selling point", perhaps because from the reports I can find, it was absolute shit, running at the equivalent of 0.3 MHz.
What I remember was the slightly later hardware "emulator" for it called the Sidecar; I put "emulator" in quotes because it was, well, basically a complete PC XT clone.
I am fairly sure a comparable x86 software emulation solution existed for the contemporary Mac of the days, called MacCharlie, which like the software-based Amiga Transformer was useless for anything other than a proof of concept demo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCharlie
As it turns out, it's a hardware device more like the Sidecar, except from the description much worse. :)
There is a lesson here for today's smartphone makers.
Today it's less peripherals (everything's integrated) and more drivers, but it's the same problem. Now the thing people can't use with your device is software. This happens at both the OS level and the app level.
If you're Samsung or Huawei and your devices can't run a vanilla Linux kernel then they can't run anything but Android. That, in turn, cements Android as the only OS anybody develops for your devices. Which makes you dependent on Google and allows them to extract concessions from you. Sort of the opposite of commoditize your complement; it's "let a third party monopolize your complement."
And this matters. PCs not working this way was what allowed Linux to take over the server market from Windows Server and proprietary Unix and everything else on defunct systems list. Which in turn means the hardware vendor isn't reliant on Microsoft. Important to PC hardware vendors both because Windows Server may not have out-competed proprietary Unix and because it's a huge license fee that cuts into the hardware vendor's margins.
So that's what Samsung is handing Google by not making it easy to replace the OS on their devices. And that in turn gives Google an effective monopoly on Android apps. That's problematic in a number of ways, many relevant to the hardware vendors, but let's start with this one. Samsung has an app store.
It only runs on Samsung devices because it's impractical to install it on other vendors' devices when they can all only run a specific version of Android that enshrines Google Play.
Now suppose that Samsung made it easy to run other operating systems on all their devices. Then other operating systems would exist. They might not overtake Android, but they would have millions of users, like desktop Linux. Enough to cause competing smartphone vendors to enable their phones to run it. And in turn to run competing app stores, allowing them to actually compete because they run on more than one vendor's device and developers have more incentive to use them.
They're really shooting themselves in the foot by not enabling this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA
(hehe I am a bit delighted in a retro way to see that arguing about PC vs. Amiga is still a thing)
And Chunky graphics became crucial for growing amounts of 3D software.
For example, your typical modern RGBA buffer will be composed of linear array of 32bit values, each of them representing 8bit Red, Green, Blue and Alpha values of individual pixels.
Planar graphics works differently, with separately addressed bitplanes for different types of colour. For the RGBA example, you'll end up with 4 different buffers, each buffer representing red, green, blue and alpha values separately, requiring separate writes etc. - however one write in single bitplane could mean multiple pixels affected.
Both approaches have their pros and cons, but in this case we're going to focus on Amiga's downfall-related specifics.
When Amiga's graphic hardware was designed, a lot of it was built with features relevant to then common "home computers", even if much more powerful. This included things like "playfield" and hw sprite support, things especially useful in 2D games. Multiple playfields allowed compositing of two colour-limited screens on top of each other by dividing available bitfields between the two screens. Sprites allowed limited pasting of objects from memory at realtime on the screen (for example, player character, enemies, missiles in a typical platformer or SHMUP game). There was also hw collision detection between sprites.
All of that advanced hw however didn't exactly help with software-rendered even pseudo-3D that became popular around that time - some features could be definitely reused (semi-programmable graphic pipeline through copper, blitter helping with bitmap ops, dual playfield allowing composition of, let's say, cockpit and exterior). Instead, you might want to compose variable-size bitmaps of pre-rendered airplane at different angles (method used by LucasArts 1988-1991 trilogy of WW2 aircraft sims), which didn't nicely match with sprite system, instead considerably taxing the blitter capacity (especially since blitting might have to be done in multiple passes due to planar graphics). Chunky graphics is also generally simpler, but changing requirements from applications definitely had their impact.
More importantly, as someone mentioned, Amiga chips were innovative and powerful... in 1985. In 1986, VGA debuted, and while not particularly powerful on its own or widely available, the increasing power of the CPUs in PCs quickly eclipsed the benefits of dedicated hw chips in Amiga, especially since the OCS (Original Chip Set) only received incremental update in 1990 (ECS) and another in 1992 (AGA). Someone already mentioned writing faster blitters running on CPU than hw blitters of Amiga allowed, plus there were considerable limitations regarding DMA capabilities (IIRC, DMA for graphic system was only allowed from "Chip" Ram, which was limited to 2MB at best? Someone correct me if I'm wrong).
There were also other areas where a dedicated enough PC owner could spend more and build a more powerful machine (wider availability of (E)ISA controllers, 1990's XGA with its higher resolution than AGA and hw blitter, etc. etc.).
The color depth of the OCS and VGA are not directly comparable. OCS and ECS allowed 32 out of 4096 colors at once. To reach the full 4096 you needed to use HAM, which while impressive, was not as flexible and required careful image design. VGA allowed 256 out of 262 144, to get something similar in the Amiga you needed AGA.
It is not directly comparable, not being pixel addressable, but was incredibly useful for anything that wasn’t fast moving and had some time to optimize the displayed image.
It also took a while for anything actually use 256 color VGA for more than mostly static pictures.
I wrote a side scroller in 1993 for the PC. I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch - without this. Scrolling was too slow and there was no double buffering on VGA. It became the norm around 1994-1995 but without it, screen updates were severely limited by CPU speed.
With mode X you could reach weird resolutions like 320x480 with 256 colors, but it was planar.
I remember being able to get VGA to run at 360x480 with 256 colors in mode-x.
"I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch"
That's mode-x. You could also for example set all 4 pixels to same color with a single write, write mask was a 4-bit value. It was great for filling polygons.
Per horizontal line! Copper could swap out palettes between/during horizontal lines. There was also 64-color extra halfbrite mode. Another 32 colors were at 50% brightness.
According to the information provided there, trying to do a 32-color full palette swap every scanline would starve the CPU.
But at least you can display pretty pictures without HAM fringing. :-)
Have you seen the Sega MegaColor demo? A crazy guy managed to play full color video at 30 fps in the Sega Megadrive. No graphics, no sprites, just change the background color for every pixel through DMA!
nonetheless I still fondly recall the thrill of seeing the all-stops-out pinnacle of this technique in a demo that ran at super hires, extended overscan PAL interlace, displaying a pin sharp image of portraits and wildlife in full 4096 color depth at something like 1510 x 602, on 1989 (!) consumer hardware (Amiga 3000).
It had an interesting mouse device that you could use as a gaming pad: https://youtu.be/7g7j0iv2QYg?t=132
I always thought the Amiga has preemptive multitasking.
(Clippy is an optional component I did not install, as much as I miss that face sometimes.)
Is there a FOSS program with a comparable user experience?
It was made at a time when Microsoft cared a lot about user experience, poured millions of dollars into user studies, design, and ensuring that every pixel was perfect, every function was keyboard-accessible, and every workflow was smooth. And it shows.
Trying to use e.g. LibreOffice or Google Docs, after that, it's like comparing a science fair project made by a kid who just wanted to pass with a C versus an A+ student whose project was also made by their parents, who also happen to be scientists.
Compare to the DOS days where every major program (wordperfect, lotus 1-2-3, etc) had a function key template. It was annoying to learn at first, but easily discoverable, and eventually you get muscle memory. Modern apps have lost that, in many ways.
However, saving does not provide me with a default filename, so there is friction there.
In the status bar, the indicator text runs right up to the border edge, nobody took the time to ensure vertical and horizontal spacing matches up.
The menubar does not provide keyboard accelerators until after I press the Alt key -- too late in terms of discoverability.
The cursor actually disappears when I use the arrow keys to move around. It's not even blinking, it's just GONE, until I stop using the arrow keys, then reappears after a delay.
The spell-checker finds an spelling mistake in both "Abiword" and "abiword".
Using only the keyboard, I cannot figure out how to change the font size, except by going through the Format->Font menu. The Font dialog has invisible or nearly-invisible focus rectangles on most controls.
I just installed it to write this comment, and I found all this stuff in the first five or so minutes of using it.
It's a nice little word processor, and I'd use it in a pinch, but it's no Word 97.
> The menubar does not provide keyboard accelerators until after I press the Alt key -- too late in terms of discoverability.
I think this is a GTK theme setting that you can override https://askubuntu.com/questions/329668/always-show-keyboard-...
I think the fact that it is off by default in the first places illustrates my point quite well. And so does the fact that I have to seek out separate configuration for the toolkit.
Not only that, but on the very page you linked, people are complaining that even the setting does not work reliably. I know that when I tried to adjust it in the past for other apps it did not work for me.
Perhaps I just needed to reboot? :)
I've used Abiword a bit, but it has been a few years, and Abiword doesn't really come close to the Microsoft Word experience back in the day. People generally have their favorite MS Word version that they like before it "went downhill", and mine is Word 5.1a for Macintosh. This is the last version of Microsoft Word that was specifically designed as a Macintosh application, rather than a cross-platform application with a Mac port.
Microsoft's turned out some very high-quality Mac applications in the 1990s and 2000s. Another notable one is Internet Explorer 5, which is unrelated to the infamous Internet Explorer 5 for Windows (the one with poor standards compliance), other than the fact that the products are made by the same company, have the same name, and have the same version number.
IE5 is also the most ported IE ever, it was ported to close to 10 different platforms.
It's like you're re-raking the code with every port, essentially doing a partial rewrite and refactor, with all the benefits that come with that.
IE5 is one of the most solid browsers I know.
Windows 3.1, Windows NT 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Solaris, and HP-UX.
In addiion, as you mention, an "IE5" of different lineage is also available for both Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X.
Here is another thing which may seem crazy in today's world: IE 5.01 was officially supported by Microsoft on Windows 2000 until 2010, more than 10 years after IE5.0's release!
There has been a severe erosion since then. From car dashboards to web design, software apps to online communities - it’s an erosion on all fronts.
Fuck everything after 2010. It sucks. Fight me.
I don't know about PS3, but the thing that bugs me about PS4 is that it requires installing games. It can't just run a game straight off the disc like PS1 and PS2 did, it has to copy it to its hard drive first.
> Modern ARM chips are certainly better than what we had in 2009 in every respect.
Modern processors are, generally, great and very fast, regardless of the instruction set. Their greatness is usually compensated with mediocre software that is being constantly rushed to meet imaginary deadlines that no user cares about. The result is that the end user never really realizes how fast and capable modern hardware actually is.
I'd still say modern ARM is a major improvement simply because performance/power ratio-wise it's already neck and neck or better than x86 in a lot of areas. x86, dating back to the P4 era and onward, has been a painful slide into power consumption/waste heat hell.
And this time around, it will be even better!
Windows XP was considered a memory hog because it needed a whopping 256MiB of RAM to run properly. I run text editors that use more of that these days, and they still feel slower than notepad felt on XP.
The good news is that almost without fail, the content on these sites is as good as the coding, and I've proven to myself time after time that I lose nothing by just closing the tab. In fact, I gain the time I would've wasted on reading low-quality content that rarely adds anything to my life.
We have, among countless other things:
- mobile devices, networks, and services that are allowing developing countries to leapfrog their progress in the world
- development toolchains and frameworks that empower a single person to create an order of magnitude more output, enabling smaller teams or even solo enterprises to create major value
- reusable rockets bringing high quality and affordable internet access to the underserved
- mass produced electric vehicles for goodness sake!!
And that's only a few tech-related advancements, the world is largely moving in the right direction in so many areas. I'd never bet against the steady drumbeat of technological progress.
However, this particular thread seems to be about the quality of user-facing software, which, overall, has been on a continuous nosedive for about 10 years, and every time I think it can't get any worse, someone figured out a new way to make it suck.
We need to look at what we can improve. Of course things have improved, but not uniformly across all domains and many things have gotten worse.
If we keep patting ourselves on back, these too will degrade. Using hindsight to definitively say what has gotten worse is how we improve including the things you are mentioning.
I kind of think of progress as navigation on a complex multidimensional domain space filled with lots of local optima. To not consult hindsight (gradient) is a bad strategy. Similarly, to not explore is to stay at the same spot. Sometimes, it is important to roll back and go to the old days and try to explore in another direction.
What does a new flagship phone do better, compared to a 2year old one? A slightly better camera, maybe more storage space, and that's it. "Back in the days" we had phones with 9,10 7-segment displays, then single line lcd screens, multiline, graphical, color, touchscreens and smartphones (each step taking only a couple of years), and since then (so, the last ~5 years) not a lot of "new stuff", that would warrant buying a new phone (except the failing battery on the old one).
Websites have got massively bloated and slow, even on modernish computers, and show even less informations than they did in the past (fscking gallery pages). We've gone from text-only sites, to basic html (with images!), javascript, to 'web 2.0' with dynamic loading... to bloatware.
As mentioned... word has gone from a five, ten...ish megabytes to hundreds of megabytes while not offering much more compared to older versions. Yes, it's a bit more polished, some things are easier now... but not a lot. Going from text to graphical mode was a "revolution", but again, not a lot new after.
Even operating systems... what does windows 10 do, that windows 7 didn't?
I mean... we do get a new feature here and then, but the push to "make a new version" is stronger than the actual need for a new version.... not at first, but once the software gets mature enough, there's (almost) "nothing new to add".
I think this is one nice thing that is very easy to take for granted.
Mobile connectivity is a wonderful thing as long as it is a means rather than an end. Sometimes it takes a glance into the past to understand the former, to realize that networks were created to enable communication rather than to captivate audiences.
Modern development toolchains are great, yet they typically cater to professionals who have the time and incentive to learn them. We don't have to look very far into the past to realize that there was a time when accessibility was as important as productivity.
Creating a world that everyone wants to live in requires a great deal of reflection regarding what we need and how to accomplish it. Letting technological development run amok may achieve some of those goals but it can also be regressive.
I think you are just getting old and not willing to discover new things
Do you know of any sites where people just talk and share, without political nonsense, flamewars, and such? Perhaps focused primarily on humor?
Hacker News is indeed such an oasis, but has a rather narrow interest range. Few people are interested in discussing spirituality here, for example.
Reddit originally had that goal. And was self-sustaining, basically funded by users. This has all changed, and that's all I want to make for a point here. (why is another discussion)
HN isn't self-sustaining that I know of, though it's also not needing to make it's users into products too.
So, is there a middle ground?
Take the HN code base, clone it, and enable these discussion norms?
We have amazing moderators here. Wise.
That's needed too, or the outcome is something we will see elsewhere, and that's by definition, not what we have here.
How to fund that?
Need hosting, moderator or two, and what else?
Maybe not too much. So maybe it won't take that much money either.
I would find any experiment along these lines both something I would want to participate in as well as very interesting to observe, depending on my role, and the nature of the discussion focus.
And it's only worse in modern systems that round-trip EVERYTHING to the "cloud" for reasons understood only by Google.
...and that's a problem, because it encourages half-baked non-solutions and a "we can always fix it later" attitude. As a result, nothing actually improves; it just erratically surges around a local maximum.
Accessibility. Everything, every single little nook and cranny is keyboard-accessible. And I mean accessible not in the sense that I can keep pressing the Tab key, and eventually the barely-visible focus rectangle may arrive at the control I want to use. I mean, everything has a visile keyboard shortcut, and the Tab key also works, and the focus rectangle is visible, and it works every time, not just when the application feels like it.
Keypresses don't get dropped from the buffer even while the application is thinking.
Fast as heck startup time. Fast menus. Fast application startup. Fast, fast, fast. My current daily driver is a 10-year-old laptop with a spinny drive, and Windows 95 is running inside a VM, which is competing for resources with my entire dev environment, so it's not like the hardware is not comparable to what it was designed for.
Consistency in look and operation. Everything has the same widgets and dialogs, and they all work about the same way, at least between Microsoft apps. Netscape and other browsers are a different story.
Flat, dull, boring interface. Everything is a flat gray, nothing is shiny, nothing is animated. Everything is a frame around the work that I'm doing, and feels like it wants to just help me, assist me with what I'm doing, and then get out of the way.
Oh yeah, and I the Save and Open File dialogs are fully-featured file managers with sorting, multi-select, copy, paste, rename, the works.
And IE6 is challenging to develop for, but I fucking love using it. It feels just like the Windows UI (Trident, after all), it's snappy, has focus rectangles on everything, and modern enough to have a DOM with all the works like createElement() getElementById().
IE3 has the most beautiful toolbar of any browser I've seen to date, and also has focus rectangles and basic CSS support. I can still use it to post to my blog.
another factor is that computers were limited in presentation and computation, they'd present to you abstracted, dull tables and operations on data. But it did serious jobs. Now we have extremely (extremely, as a CGI fan, I cannot deny that) fancy presentation systems, but the actual data displayed is linear list of paragraphs, a few pictures and data points. Well computer is hypermainstream so obviously it talks to the average user.. but it says something about what computing was and is now.
Got me thinking about why computers in the first place.. in the 90s a computer was mostly sold as an office like tool for the home. "Get access to big corp tools !" marketing feeling. You get to write document, print them, organize your stuff (some people had movie tape databases), finance etc. But in retrospect we didn't use much of that (it was more a gaming machine for me, and later CGI tool) and with the web.. printing went away.. local db went away. People probably still do financing. But now electronics have become a social gateway .. see news, pics, chat. A billion dollar device production requires either a nation, a big company or 7 billion customers :)
Do you ever try to imagine the face of a 50-80s scientist if you came back in time to show him an iphone ? he'd faint of laughter I guess.
It also has a proper (native!) settings dialog with tons of configurability and security zoning. While modern browser's rendering engines and JS have gotten more featureful, I think the UI has gotten much worse in contrast, with everything going in the same direction of dumbed-down-Chrome-clones. My ideal browser would have the configurability and UI of early IE/Firefox, with the JS and rendering engines of current browsers.
If you don't mind a learning curve and primarily keyboard driven, e.g. if you already love Vim, consider giving qutebrowser a try. You can even run it straight from the source tree, since it uses Python for its wrapper.
It uses QtWebEngine and Chromium, which does mean some issues and drawbacks, but the frame around it is nearly perfect. It's an amazing piece of software, and truly next generation browsing for nerds, IMO.
It's a bit like Vimium, but the keyboard bindings are native and always work, as opposed to being at the mercy of JS injection into the page. All of the settings are accessible via :command mode, and permissions are as granular as you can imagine. There's no graphical settings, but other than that I think it matches your description.
This annoys me to no end. Some applications (Firefox) even reorder keystrokes!
I'm beginning to think we've been using the wrong programming paradigm for user interfaces for the last 20 years. I never had these sorts of complaints about DOS programs, or even Windows up to version 2000. Then something changed. Computers have been feeling slower and slower ever since.
I'm on an Apple Silicon MacBook Air but still often run WordPerfect 4.2 and DataEase 4.53 under DosBox (also Boxer is good but not tried it on M1 yet).
BTW if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of running WordPerfect DOS in emulation, Columbia University (NYC) has a great site at http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/ which may even help fixing other DOS software issues.
I also have the VM set up already for IE, which def does not work right in Wine.
When XP was released, there was intended to be no support for Office other than Office XP.
Thousands of questions were raised whether Office 97 would work in Windows XP and it was totally discouraged by Microsoft every time.
After about 6 months somebody (like a big company) tried it and since it worked quite well, the news began to filter out.
Within another 6 months there was all kinds of support info for Office 97 under XP as if the disinformation campaign had never existed.
Do you mean Wine? It's imperfect emulation for large apps, and it's slower than a VM.
The only Office app that I strongly prefer in its modern form is Excel. Modern Excel has some really nice enhancements (sequences and spillover, let and lambda, flash-fill, table formatting, etc) that I miss when I use older versions.
My favorite memories of the era were the BBSs. These were dial up services with one or two lines that a hobbyist would run on his home machine. They were very local, because calling long distance was expensive. It was a tech nerd only local hangout club for the local area. Also, at this point in time, nerds were very split off from the rest of society. We were really our own strange order of weirdos and very very uncool, while nowadays a much larger percentage of people would say they're in tech and everyone uses tech and is a tech nerd now.
Oh, stack overflow definitely existed, but only the kind that makes programming harder.
EDIT: Corrected a typo.
(This is probably the one time in my writing career when the initial "Well," actually makes a difference in communicating the idea I intended to convey.)
I don't remember the Inside Macintosh books being especially large and heavy; they were broken into volumes which were a half-inch or inch thick, except for volume VI. It wasn't terribly long before these books ended up online on Apple's developer website but I don't remember when that happened.
I self taught myself on macs. And not knowing how to correctly validate my inputs, I would crash, reboot, try again until I got it right. So many reboots.
Crashing and rebooting wasn't that bad before multi-process became the norm, as the crashing app was taking your data down with it anyway, who cares if you needed to wait 5 seconds for the computer to boot again.
I could park my hard drive and shut my computer down every night and think twice about it. Now I don't bother, because my coffee will be done before the computer will let my login.
I remember I would grab the local computer user newsletter every time I'd go to the computer store with my father just to pore over the BBS listings to see if there were any new ones that had popped up recently.
It was really a fun time to be part of that whole early (and very local) era of 'online computing'.
Gopher and the rudimentary gopher-with-pictures web already existed. Mosaic was two years away.
If you were a hobbyist, you might buy an Amiga 3000 instead of a mid-tier Mac or PC- the Amiga 4000 was a year away.
On the PC, Wolfenstein 3D was year away. DOOM was two years away.
And yet well into the nineties, PC nerds were amazed to be able to spin up multiple Wordperfect 5 windows, and they may as well have been at the vanguard as far as most people were concerned! Quickbasic! Lotus 1-2-3!
A lot of people didn't want a single point of failure after watching Atari and Commodore blow themselves up spectacularly.
Also, the early 90s were when the IBM market started to be commoditized enough to bring prices way down(). The self-implosion of Amiga and a bit later a near-death experience on Apple's side just combined with the relatively cheap hardware on the IBM side enough to kill off nearly every non-Wintel platform for average desktop users.
This was also the point where Computer Shopper turned into hundreds of pages of sellers offering hardware at all price points, allowing easy entry into the market for a new owner. The internet sped that up further.
- the SGI Indigo was released
- the Symbolics XL1200 was a year old, and the MacIvory III was released
- the Sparcstation 2 (SunOS!) was a year old
The really big deal was when everyone bought a Windows 95 machine to get on the internet with AOL about five years later.
- O'Reilly had been in business for thirteen years, had been publishing X11 manuals with animals on the cover for three years, and had just published the first edition of Programming Perl
- Python existed in some form (for two years already!), but no one had ever heard of it until the Grail browser four years later, which no one has heard of now
- the Video Toaster for the Amiga was a year old. So was Photoshop (on the Mac). NIH Image (also Mac) was even older. Frame grabbers were already well established in scientific imaging. Array processors were a thing (the one I saw was for the PC), as the kids say, if you had the budget for one
- IRC was three years old
Totally! My best friend had an SGI Indy workstation (with a webcam!) at home when they came out... That was in 1993 (?) : )
Can you imagine getting to play on a SGI workstation to then come back home and find my 486 (which I'm pretty sure I got in 1991)?
Thankfully Linus releasing Linux wasn't far away.
I was part of a mentoring program in 1993 where I was a shadow at the local hospital's IT department. They were able to purchase an Indigo for some sort of research and allowed me to explore it.
My home computer at the time was a 286, which could barely run Windows 3.0.
Visual BASIC 1.0 for DOS was a year away, a little sluggish and too late to change the world, but still amazing for those of us who could not afford the RAM to run Windows.
They were already showing Visual Basic for Windows at trade shows and Hypercard on the mac was four years old.
You actually could run Windows without a mouse (I did it for a while). The only thing that didn't work was Paintbrush. Everything else was fully keyboard accessible. Every or nearly every menu item and form field had a prominently underlined keyboard accelerator, and you could always rely on the tab order (for form fields) or the arrow keys (for menu items).
So it wouldn't clutter up the physical top of your desk until you wanted to occasionally run a program like Windows 2 which supported a mouse.
Even then you'd run into headaches with things like Ultima 7's JEMM memory manager that insisted you not have EMM386/QEMM running. To say that managing a DOS install was somewhat painful is an understatement.
In a lot of ways 1992 and 1993 were more interesting than 1991, as they saw the first releases of Slackware, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Windows NT, Solaris, etc.
Huh? I'm wondering if the writer knew there Macintoshes (and Amigas!) with GUIs over a half-dozen years before 1991. And Windows 3.0--I was there, and used it--was bloody awful.
Computing was definitely a niche industry back then for most folks.
I kinda miss it.
1991: 100MB = serious work
2021: 100MB = so tiny you can't buy storage that small, can't be serious
In 1996 it was very cheap.
I was stuck with a 386/16Mhz/40 megs hd, and a whopping megabyte of ram.
At least it taught me that it was sometimes worth optimizing my code...
Sometime aroundish 1988 I paid $600 for an 80MB hard drive, out of a $12K/yr stipend. Good times.
286 + 1MB RAM + 40MB hard drive.
This was 1992 and it was valued about 1000$.
First computer that was strictly mine was a CoCo 3 in 1986, and the first one I built entirely myself was a 486-66 back in 1993.
Yep, we definitely remember those first machines.
I thought MS Extended Basic on the CoCo was pretty cool.
Ended up moving to Apple ][ a few years after that, but still have very fond memories of the CoCo, even though everyone else I knew had something else and liked to refer to my computer as a Trash 80.
3.0 would crash every 15 minutes on average. 3.1 would crash every 45 minutes on average. 95 would go a day at a time, 98 would go several days, XP was stable a month at a time when there weren't major exploits or bad driver behavior.
...and so on. I may be overstating the impact SLIGHTLY, but 3.0 really was crash prone to the point magazines heavily pushed people to 3.1 when that came out, and 95 was definitely significantly improved over that, and so forth (skipping ME, of course) until XP.
XP, on the other hand, practically never crashed, unless you had bad drivers. Just like Windows NT4 & 2000 before it.
12.5 MHz
1MB ram
2x 5.25" floppy drives (one HD, one DD)
10MB hard drive
HGC (640x200 monochrome) with amber monitor.
That was in 1992 and it was an abysmally slow system.
I spent literally HOURS trying every single driver on the SimCity 2000 CD until I found one that worked - it was an OAK videocard with the bare minimum of RAM needed.
I still regularly use a 2012 laptop, but if you were using a 9-year-old PC back in 1991, it would be a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088, or something like a Commodore 64.
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks/But it was obsolete before I opened the box/You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique/ Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great/If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight.
These days, my parent's 8-year-old computer with 8GB+ of memory, a high-end (for the time) CPU, and an SSD is good enough for everything they do.
I remember selling my gaming computer at college every 3-6 months and building the new hotness and it being NOTICEABLY better each time.
Smartphones came further, obviously, starting from nothing in 2006m but I see 2014-2015 as the start of a plateau. When we started seeing glass-backed cases and folding screens, I knew we'd reached the land of diminshing returns.
His machine also came with a Windows graphics accelerator video card, which was a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Back then, you could see the difference in redraw speeds between accelerated and non-accelerated very easily.
These days, 2D is so simple that nobody even thinks about whether your card can keep up or not.
Back then, even in MS-DOS you had a lot of questions about if your card could do VESA modes, undocumented video modes, etc, and sometimes you'd need SciTech Display Doctor to get those modes. Linear framebuffers weren't commonly supported, and getting the best possible performance required that.
I remember how proud I was when I tried every combination and got max efficiency.
Also the wierd IRQ issues. Simpler when you had to set them with header pins on the card in question. When early plug and play came in it was awful, automatic IRQ conflicts and sometimes no way to change them. Was a real pain when the knock off sound blaster clone I had would auto assign itself anything other than IRQ 5 and some games would stop making sounds!
If one were not touched by good fortune whilst specifying, assembling, and configuring one’s system, then one might reasonably expect interact much too often with this obscure system component.
(Kind of like mDNSResponder on OS X.)
Here’s the thing though. In that transitory phase between DOS and Windows one often has to “drop to DOS” to run some software, and even assemble “Boot Disks” to provide a customised stripped down environment, especially for games.
The joy in this particular piece of software was that not only was it obscure and poorly documented but that even once you figured out it was required it still broke some games that required access “all” of the lower 640k which often left you with a choice between not having sound and not playing the game at all ...
Also known as plug and pray. Yes, I remember that time.
XP, and the hardware of that new era, for all its faults was a HUGE step forward on UPnP.
It got fun when real sound blasters had broken config, so a generic driver (for a unix system) would fail.
In my experience (playing with unix) IRQ conflicts was much more a dos/windows problem than hardware. Though the hardware was nasty too.
Transferring data meant either a stack of floppies, or something like LapLink which used a special cable for the parallel port, or a null-modem cable for the serial port. LapLink could transfer at 115200 baud. And it cost over $100 1990s dollars.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kggOZ4-YEKUC&pg=PA92&red...
Not often. Usually one floppy (maybe two) would suffice: programs and data were proportionally smaller. And if you had two floppy drives, as many computers did, this was no big deal.
The only time you needed "a stack of floppies" or LapLink is when you wanted to backhp or transfer an entire hard disk.
One summer, I used a similar product called Brooklyn Bridge to hook our old 286 with 40 MB HDD to our 386 tower because I ran out of disk space. The filesystem mounted with no problems, and I played the VGA remake of Quest for Glory over it. It was unbearably slow, but I still thought it was awesome.
(edit, yes Windows 3.0 could use CGA 640x200 with 1 bit colour)
[1] "Microsoft Office 97 Professional edition is provided on a total of 55 diskettes" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/tn-archiv...
This is a beta version, but still should demonstrate nicely: https://ia801800.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/30...
eyeroll
That would have been nice had it ever happened.