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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, good riddance.

And let's chuck into the dustbin of history fiddling with IRQ dipswitches to disambiguate your mouse, video, disk, and audio controllers; the "turbo" button; "It is now safe to turn off your computer"; CGA/EGA/VGA/HGA/MCGA/SVGA/XGA, RLL/MFM/SCSI/IDE, and while we're at it, TSR programs like sound drivers, mouse drivers, etc. Let's not even discuss OS/2.

You know what sucked? Booting up into CGA and not being able to figure out how to escape that abomination. Why not pine for that?

All of this trash is behind us and frankly I think we're better off for it. If you want to go play with obsolete computers, then finding some old computers and some old computer junkies who still enjoy that junk is the right way to go. Personally, I had my fun, but I like our modern machines so much more than those old smokey capacitor poppers. But I have to admit, I almost miss compiling my own kernel. Almost.

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This is from an era when you could still make the computer do what you want. Those days are long gone now; incidentally, that's why "It is now safe to turn off your computer" does not belong in this list, because it still exists, just not under that name. Windows (or whatever OS) decides when you can turn it off. Just like it now decides when it's time to upgrade.

Actually there _is_ a lot to be missed about those times, in spite of all the "progress" we've made since then.

"It is now safe to turn off your computer" was a kludge for running Windows 95 on PCs with a physical on/off switch (as opposed to newer ATX power supplies, which have a pushbutton to turn them on and can be switched off via software). I guess it's theoretically possible to build a modern PC with a 30+ year PSU, and then you would see this screen again - or, more realistically, you could disconnect the PS_ON line (https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/394414/how-d...) from the mainboard, preventing the system from turning off the PSU.

My 3D printer has a physical off switch. And it runs Linux - debian - on an embedded ARM board, so I can ssh into the printer etc. (I can even hook up a keyboard and HDMI monitor)

I fear about my filesystem every time I notice the printer is running at night (after a long print job) and I just turn it off without going over to my pc, ssh in and shut down the OS.

Still, it hasn't eaten my filesystem, yet ... ext4 journaling DOES seem to work.

I won't lament the loss of giant, stretched-out consoles that flash by too fast to do anything useful with either, but on the other hand I don't see why "there should be a way to make the text bigger" is a problematic request.

There are all sorts of disabilities that might necessitate a console with large text, and setting a specific size (in this case 80x25 because it used to be a standard) isn't such an outrageous demand.

The author knows a solution: set a specific resolution and select a specific font. The problem is that they can't pick that resolution, even though they could before, because on UEFI and non-amd64 the common GPU configuration parameters don't work in Linux.

We should default to a modern system, but the kernel should have a standard way of configuring the boot console. For every person who wants 80x25 mode, there's someone with a weird device that outputs three pixel high fonts because the default resolution is bugged, and both need the same override to fix their issues.

No, you can make large text (and GUI) much easier today. The author is just obsessed with one particular grid size.

I have a related complaint about modern consoles: They are frequently unreadable, because they just have to use all the pixels. I booted Debian (IIRC) on a laptop with a 13" 4K screen and got something like 426x135 characters. No chance for me to read them, but there sure were a lot of them. My eyes aren't the best, but I think most people would find that unreadable.

Defaulting to 80x25 (or anything else reasonable) in an almost infinitely ugly font would be a vast improvement.

And in 80x25, there’s so much text that it zooms past you with no chance to ever read it, and Scroll Lock won’t work. Can’t have it both ways, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.

To the trash heap you snappy applications. Thank god for electron based IDEs.

Needless complexities have simply crept in other parts of the machine.

There were always applications that were snappy and applications that were dog slow; sometimes even the same application with different releases. And that's still true today.

In fact, I would argue that the objective experience of responsiveness has not meaningfully changed at all if you stick the average, except that speed and capacity are much more available if you are willing to spend even a little bit more time and money.

Thank you, 100 times this. There was literally nothing fun about it.

I remember desperately trying to put drivers in high memory, because Wing Commander 2 needed more memory if I was to get the precious images of the joystick moving. Slowly removing items, one by one from my autoexec.bat file, desperately hoping it was going to work, but then the creeping realisation that I would have to unload my soundcard drivers if I wanted a chance.

Or the time our bios randomly wiped its memory and my dad was convinced I had destroyed the harddrive. Thankfully I was told by a family friend that I would only have to turn on the BIOS and set it to # 31 (because somehow hard disk sizes, sectors, et cetra were all standardized) in order to access our precious 95 megabyte hard disk.

SimCity CD-ROM edition was the greatest. It needed sound card drivers, mouse drivers, CD-ROM drivers and MSCDEX, and it required 605kB of free conventional memory.

Oh, and only some hard drives were standard like that. For others, you needed to set sectors, tracks and landing zone manually. Happy fun times if your CMOS battery ran out.

Ah, yes, and I also remember what a relief it was when the newer generation of games (starting with Doom IIRC) used "DOS extenders" to switch the CPU into protected mode and be able to use 16 MB or more without any fiddling...

Another anecdote from around that time (or a bit later): some friends were alarmed that their PC was not booting Windows as usual. Turns out they had forgotten a bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive, which was showing some cryptic text mode menu on startup. Easy fix: remove CD, restart, works...

I guess you never got you a GUS, Iiyama monitor, or Courier 56K V.92 modem for Christmas.

One of my uncles worked at Hayes back in the day. Those were truly happy years!

I do find it funny that there are so many people on HN who work in a rapidly advancing cutting edge industry, but are also absolute stuck-in-the-mud curmudgeons who want everything to stay exactly as it was 4 decades ago.

Another example is dropping support for 32-bit x86. "But how will I run Linux on my PC from 2001?". Or the resistance to Rust in Linux because LLVM doesn't support the PDP-8 architecture.

> Or the resistance to Rust in Linux because LLVM doesn't support the PDP-8 architecture.

Tbf I don't even think Unix was ever ported to the PDP-8 :D

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