What Modern Humans Can Learn from Ancient Software | Hacker News Reader

What Modern Humans Can Learn from Ancient Software

wired.com

70 pointsrbanffy21 comments

Last weekend I was sitting in a car while my son who needs hours to get his license was driving. We were in the middle of nowhere in Ohio with nothing but cornfields around us. On my iPad, I was watching real-time 1080p stream of my other son playing hockey half way across the country. I still remember the sound of modem connecting though I wouldn’t claim anymore I can whistle myself to get the connection going. Heck, I still remember the time when you had to schedule long distance (anything in another town) phone calls in advance and wait for an operator to call you back when the connection was ready.

Never used WordPerfect and don’t care much. Turbo Pascal on the other hand is still a high bar for modern IDEs.

Used wordstar on early pc 1989 to write tomes of my user interviews when implementing ERP systems. Back then was writing COBOL on Wang minis for ERP systems. Things just worked. BBS worked really well and were fun. Fast forward to 1996 and gopher land and list servers were a whole lot of fun, and just worked.

Had learned pascal but never got to use at work. TP as above said set a benchmark for speed and ease of use. Today one needs vi with plugins to achieve same.

Nowadays I prefer vi for all file editing except GUI stuff when modern ide can be very helpful. And home code mostly in python because I’m casual and can’t hold everything in my head so python code written in vi or using thonny is fun.

My 2c.

> Emulation reminds me to ask myself whether the computing experience is always getting better.

My opinion is that "the computing experience" as in "sitting and using a computer like a normie" peaked maybe 2010? Windows 7 era. Web search worked better, somehow. Javascript on the average site wasn't as bad yet.

I'd argue the year was 2014, but I largely agree; there have been many improvements since then, but few of them landed for the average desktop user - partly because of the intense push to get people off of desktops.

I would say 2012. It was right as mobile versions of sites were becoming common and bandwidth was high enough to facilitate HD video and live streaming, but it was before AI/ML turned every social media site into a living hell scape.

Story needs a link to "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer" by Ed Nather ( nather@utastro.as.utexas.edu )

Mel is the Gilgamesh of programmers.

https://www.sac.edu/AcademicProgs/Business/ComputerScience/P...

Here are some links to stories about The Story of Mel. Original is on usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

https://jamesseibel.com/the-story-of-mel/

Well if all of that is ancient, I must be the lich king under the mountain, so beware, all of you. OoooooOOOOoooh!

The biggest lesson to be learned looking at that or older software is that what we optimize has changed over time.

Mostly because of hardware improvements (Moore's Law and all), we changed how we make code. Everything else is only incidental to that. Although often the subject of "heroic" tales of epic nerdery!

Even John Carmack, the Lord High King Bitdiddler, has said that the most important thing is delivering value to the customer. It's just that you had to bitdiddle and aggressively optimize in order to get a computer of the 80s or, to a lesser extent, early 90s, to do anything useful. Today we have so much CPU power sloshing around it's ridiculous. If compute were money we'd all be Elon Musk compared to our forebears; even if you just had a $200 HP Stream you'd still be like a minor billionaire or something. So there's much less need to aggressively optimize, especially when not optimizing gets you shorter time to market.

And that, boys, girls, and other, is why you can sometimes see Microsoft Teams draw its widgets one by one like a Windows 1.x application.

I recently read an article about how most modern mainframe deployments (IBM excluded) are software emulation running on x86 platforms. That's really interesting to me. If it wasn't for the proprietary nature of the software, I'd think mainframes would be more accessible than ever.

It got me to wondering why old architectures that were consumer-targeted aren't also emulated for much more than nostalgic gamers and the niche who swear WordPerfect was the peak of word processors.

My theory is that, for the most part, consumer hardware for small businesses and home offices ran consumer software. If my Apple II running VisiCalc dies and my business runs on it, I'm probably going to adopt Windows and Excel instead of trying to run VisiCalc in an emulator.

With large businesses running COBOL apps on mainframes, that software is probably highly customized to their business and their workflow. It's probably cheaper to buy a license for an official emulator rather than trying to port or rewrite the software.

Although, a part of me thinks it would be cool to run a web server on a blindingly fast, emulated Commodore 64.

> I recently read an article about how most modern mainframe deployments (IBM excluded) are software emulation running on x86 platforms.

That's not particularly new either. The k-12 school district I attended and worked at in information systems did that in 1996 or so. It was a small unisys mainframe, so only maybe 20 feet long, 3 feet deep and 3 feet tall, became a 4U box running emulation on NT4, I think quad pentium pro, but maybe it was only dual, cause I'm not convinced you could fit four ppros in 4U.

That distict currently has 70 schools and 44,000 students. The mainframe was used for grades, schedules, payroll/personell files, etc. Had a terminal version of wordperfect on there too, as I recall (although, maybe that was on a different system, I was a desktop tech, I didn't get to work on real computers)

> I recently read an article about how most modern mainframe deployments (IBM excluded) are software emulation running on x86 platforms

I know where there are four thumping great Sun boxes running in production, each roughly the size of a bar fridge, with about as much computing power as a Raspberry Pi 4.

If only you could run Solaris 8 and Oracle 10 on an RPi...

I’ve found a small hobby in restoring old Nintendo consoles in the last few years. I’ve repaired DMG’s, a couple of DS’s, and a 2DSXL. They made great machines. But the fun thing is programming for them.

Brings me back. Almost want to fire up Workbench and find a copy of Protracker. Or get Dosbox and Turbo C.

Except that modern computers, for all the pain points they have, are faster and more convenient. I think we can still learn a thing or two. Like rendering a page of text scrolling without any tearing or stuttering. But I wouldn’t want to go back to them.

They can learn how to root a Sun Microsystems SunOS by merely pressing the space bar 127 times.

Mh, for the systems they cite what can be learnt is that some humans have tried to play not really knowing what to do with computers...

They should have go deeper in the past to re-learn...

Check out F83 Forth in DOS. It’s a goddamn masterpiece.

Modern humanity is 200,000 years old. Neolithic civilization is about 10,000 years old. Writing is 5000 years old. The Middle Ages was 1500 years ago. The printing press is 600 years old. The Industrial Revolution is about 250 years old. Humans went to the moon about 50 years ago.

WordPerfect 5.1 is 33 years old.

Humans who used WordPerfect 5.1 when it first came out were just as modern as any humans. In fact many of them are still alive and still at the cutting edge of technology.

The writer has no clue what “modern” and “ancient” mean when referring to humans.

It's a Wired article.

The title is meant to evoke an image, rather than be taken literally.

That said, it is a weak article. It is more of a nostalgia trip that says very little about learning from our past.

This is a thing now. Instead of modern humans putting in an effort to learn hard won knowledge their predecessors tried to communicate to them, we have know-nothing reporters incentivised to manufacture drivel for their corporate masters selling ads.

And old men yelling at clouds.

And you seem to have no idea how fast the computer technology was going.

Maybe WP 5.1 is not neolithic but it's definitely late antiquity in the computer software terms.

A long fact-based post just to misunderstand a joke. This is peak HN.

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