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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I was 6 and my dad brought home an Osbourne for me to play with. Just using CPM felt like dungeon diving to this weird world where you might find a loot in the form of a game or something.

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I completely agree with this comment. I could have spent all day on my C64 without even having a game to play or knowing how to code beyond PRINT and GOTO. Hacking around on a computer back in the 80s made me feel like I was part of a secret club and that, at any moment, I was going to live out War Games or some such (especially once we had a modem). The possibilities seemed limitless!

One thing that modern computing has never been able to replicate is instant on. Literally press power button - thing is running. Nothing like having part of your memory address space mapped directly to ROM. No updates and no second chances!

I'd love to reinvent computing from scratch and fix this. There's no good reason it should take so (comparatively) long for modern PC's to boot. It's a symptom of all the complexity grafted on over the decades.

I think there are fundamental technological reasons as well. For example, even if you were willing to never update the OS, could you purchase a 1GB ROM chip for example? If using EEPROM, would the performance match RAM? Most people would not want to trade run time performance for improved boot time.

The thing is, there are far more trade-offs today than there were in the days of the C64. It is a worthwhile goal however, ideally computers should turn on instantly.

When I got my first PC (a Linux Eee PC netbook), I remember opening an xterm and typing each letter of the alphabet, one at a time and hitting TAB-TAB to see all the commands that start with that letter. Not an efficient way to learn how to use bash, but it was exciting.

The biggest hurdle for me was figuring out "how do I open a file?" I could cd around and ls, but what if I wanted to open a .doc in openoffice? There was no "double-click" for the command line.

A nice thing about Apple’s Terminal is the open [0] command. I miss that in Windows Powershell and would likely miss it in Linux as well.

———

[0]: https://scriptingosx.com/2017/02/the-macos-open-command/

Linux and windows also have this command. Under windows it is called start. Under Linux it is called open as well.

> Under Linux it is called open as well.

You mean xdg-open? I'm not aware of a commonly available "open" tool under Linux.

I eventually found out about xdg-open, but I'm glad that I didn't know about it from the start. I learned to open things the more "normal" way (eg `soffice document.doc`).

Sidenote, I really loved and miss my Asus Eee PC, and that netbook era of laptops. That and my og Motorola droid with the slide keyboard was all i needed (along with my big chucky remote server).

yes yes yes!

I tried to convey some of that magic, or at least logically reason why those 8-bits were awesome, in a blog post once - https://retrofun.pl/2021/05/18/hobbyarding/ :)

It still feels like this sometimes. Finding poorly documented system calls, changing screen properties in ways beyond BASIC, getting into how CP/M works internally... (more comprehensible than today's 1000x larger systems)... Or even doing Advent of Code in BASIC is cool!

I tried conveying the same to my teen children. It went over like a lead zeppelin.

so it IS only in our heads?

on the other hand, nobody would read a manual these days anymore...

i wouldn't say in our heads like we made it up, but it's just an experience that you cannot replicate if you've already experienced modern computing. growing up and experiencing the changes from analog to digital, dial-up to always on gigabit, 8bit to 64bit address space, 8bit color to 32bit, 8bit audio to 24bit, is all different because we have that frame of reference so it means more to us.

also, i didn't read manuals back then. i didn't know where they were. closest to a manual i had were Byte magazines

My first introduction to The Command Line was playing MUDs on a IIgs and I've never stopped thinking about it in terms of exploration.

As a young teen, I joined a local Commodore users group and at the meetings you could buy the latest monthly floppy disk for a small fee, and you never knew what you would find on it.

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