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Comment by samuel | Hacker News Reader

The best way is being restricted to dumb terminals for compiling and running university assigments.

I don't know how younger people force themselves to learn to use the command line. I had a windows 98 at home at the time and the university enviroment seemed primitive in comparison, but I had no choice.

And were lucky, we had X-terminals!

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For even faster learning make sure the remote machine is far enough away that network lag is a factor. It’s amazing how fast the student will learn I/O redirection, tailing files, and grepping for needles, and of course automating the entire build / test lifecycle.

I first learned not only the Unix CLI but Vim under these conditions.

I typed the HTML for my student website by hand in a minimal and ancient Vim build, because student websites were hosted on some kind of Unix mainframe.

It probably took me 2 hours to write 5 sentences! I was so proud of myself that I added a footer to the effect of:

> This page was typed painstakingly in Vim. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

I'm sure I would have eventually forced myself to learn Vim anyway if I never had access to this Unix system, but it was definitely important and formative to start off this way.

When I was at uni and I logged in from home with my 1200 baud modem, I used vi's "open mode" (no, vim doesn't have it), which is visual mode, but restricted to one line at a time. I even had a shell alias for "ex +o $*" to start it. It was quite fun to use, but nowadays it's not terribly useful anymore, so I can see why vim hasn't implemented it.

Having used a 3270 terminal in an extremely saturated system, it's amazing how much your way of working changes. Typing a full page of code, checking for typos, doing a test run in your head, then finally pressing Enter and sipping your coffee while the system took 1-2 minutes to process the screen.

As soon as it was upgraded, we reverted to the normal workflow of pressing Enter first, the correcting typos, paginating instead of searching, debugging live instead of in our heads, etc. I don't think we were more of less productive either way, they're just different ways of working.

And compression

<yorkshire_accent>Luxury!!</yorkshire_accent>

When I were a lad we had a teletype terminal in Pollock Halls (Edinburgh) to complete our assignments (well there were some VT100s but with deadlines coming up you had to take what was free!).

Over at Heriot-Watt we had SGIs and Windows boxes aplenty and I still found myself working in a little office on a VT100 hooked up to a Sun 3 (which ran a forgotten line printer). At first just because there was never any demand for the room, then later because it was just more fun.

Teletype ! Luxury!

Why when I was a lad had to get up 10 minutes before we went to sleep, mill our own paper AND punch the cards, and if you left an instruction out it was no supper for a week.

Yeah, it helps to have better equipment. My initiation consisted of getting stuck in emacs on a VT220 connected to a MIPS DECstation.

I don't remember if it was a VT220 or VT320 that did it but I had to use one in undergrad computer lab (also connected to some kind of DEC running ultrix) where whenever emacs did a screen redraw (for example if you did a page down with C-v) it would go into I-search mode because something in the terminfo had a C-s to freeze the screen (before some more commands and then a C-q to un-freeze), and this was visible to emacs.

Anyway what I'm trying to say is just as I'm glad I didn't have to use punch cards, I'm glad that the youth don't have to deal with that kind of nonsense.

The default options for shadow-IT are VBA and Powershell, since you don't need to ask permission or install anything to make a mvp.

I guess there will be many Powershell users in future for that reason alone.

I've worked with a client that blocks cmd, but not Powershell or VBA. God, I hate security-by-explicit-requirement.

I have a few dumb terminals connected to my machine. I wanted to get an X-terminal but I’m holding off because I’m worried about the incompatibility between modern X-clients with whatever extensions they may use and the old X-servers typically running on the terminals.

You're most likely to have problems with video playback. Most other things should work quite well.

That sounds good, I had a hunch video playback wouldn’t work. My only other hesitation is that the particular ones only connect over 10Base5, which would involve some extra networking work and SLIP, which I’m not sure is even support on modern Linux given PPP seems to be the go to for that sort of thing now.

Does it actually have onboard 10Base5 or an AUI connector? If the latter, there are millions, or at least dozens, of 10BaseT to AUI transceivers sitting in people's junk drawers. EBay has a bunch at $10 and $15 price points.

Then it's just plugging it into a switch port.

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