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Comment by pixelmonkey | Hacker News Reader

All I could think about when listening to this interesting clip is, "How many young people, today, even have any idea what he's talking about, re: computers being ugly and hard to use?" Since this is 1983, he's obviously talking about IBM PCs[1] and DOS[2] -- not even MS Windows (Windows 3.1[3] wouldn't arrive until 1993, a full decade later). But that might be lost on younger listeners today.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC%E2%80%93compatible

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1#Windows_3.1

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It’s funny but when I talk to my younger brothers friends (only a few years apart), they have never had to deal with the multitude of ports (scsi, vga, ps/2 etc) , multitude of media types (floppy, zipdrive, cassettes, dv tape etc) or even tasks like defragmentation of hard drives.

What a wonderful boon that is to entire generations. As Steve says, today you can’t even imagine it any other way.

Like most progress, it is only partially "complete".

When we look at SSDs and flash memory, we worry about TRIM, atime being off, TLC vs MLC vs SLC or what have you, how it behaves when it's near full, very hot etc.

For USB-C connectors, we have no idea how fast any device is going to charge, how fast is data transfer going to be, and whether some of the things are going to work at all (TB vs USB, alt-DP or not, PD or not).

In a sense, multitude of connectors was simpler because it wore those capabilities right on the face of it: if it fits, it works.

For both your examples, that’s not something 99% of people have to consider though.

But most computer users did have to understand the things I mentioned to some degree to get things done.

If you get a mismatched usb-c cable, chances are you’ll still get some data transfer or you’ll just try another till it works. A data only cable being used for data is no different to an end user than a broken cable.

Defragmentation of drives is pretty similar to all the SSD related issues we face today.

Difference between VGA and PS/2 was really more obvious than using USB-C for all of your peripherals and displays and power (and there are still HDMI, DisplayPort and regular AC and DC ports too)

There are now USB-C cables with power meters which might satisfy your curiosity (re: charging power).

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22907150/usb-c-pd-cable-p...

Maybe they just never had desktop PCs? Mine has a ps/2 port, various different colored USB type A ports, USB type C, DVI, HDMI, RJ-45, 3.5mm audio, and I just bought a M.2 PCIe adapter card because SSDs have two different popular interfaces. I also have a micro-SD to USB adapter and a box full of just as many cables as I had in the 1990's. Graphics cards now have their own special power connector, as do SATA drives. HDMI comes in 2 or 3 different sized connectors, so does SATA. It's no less of a mess than it was then.

Even if you have a desktop, or even if you build one, most people do not use those ports actively.

Most are there for vestigial reasons. What percentage of computer builders do you think are familiar with the floppy header for example?

Yea we don't use that but we do use just as many incompatible connectors like most of what I listed. Even M.2 drives have two mutually incompatible connectors which look almost identical. It's easier to tell serial vs parallel port than it is purple vs blue vs black vs green USB-A ports.

Apple has always been good at keeping that clean though, at least for the external ports.

> Since this is 1983, he's obviously talking about IBM PCs[1] and DOS[2]

More likely, he was talking about CP/M, Commodore's C64 or earlier systems, Apple II, or mainframe/midrange terminal systems including Unix since

> it was not until 1984 that IBM PC and clones became the dominant computers [1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_the_IBM_PC_on_t...

That's an interesting Wikipedia page! Thanks for sharing.

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