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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

That's a beautifully written post. Almost like a book. I love it. Also, it made me notice that how much I missed the artistry of computer magazine ads. There was something magical with the experience of reading a computer magazine that I don't experience on any media anymore. Beautiful ads was part of that experience. How the tables have turned now.

That said, DOSBox's TrueType fonts threw me off. It looks great of course, but it's similar to listening to Synthwave: there are some familiar elements from the era it represents, but it still feels alien.

I first learned about spreadsheets on a TV show in Turkey[1] that I believed demoed Lotus 1-2-3, and my 10 year old mind was blown! What an elegant, unique, and flexible way to model computation! We take spreadsheets for granted today, but I think it's one of the greatest inventions in computing history.

[1] https://youtu.be/tq7auBjEIU4?si=ByTvm2bIT_Dpklqz&t=1451

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> There was something magical with the experience of reading a computer magazine that I don't experience on any media anymore. Beautiful ads was part of that experience. How the tables have turned now

I think that’s a combination of information underload and longer lead times.

Information underload: back then, you have a new magazine, at best, every week, if you could afford to buy multiple or had access to a good library. That meant you were willing to spend time looking at ads, and they didn’t even have to look nice. Old Bytes had many more or less type-written ads, for example.

Longer lead times: if you published in, say, Byte or Dr Dobbs, which appeared monthly, your sales department had a month to prepare the looks of each ad (pricing for hardware likely would be filled in at the last moment). Nowadays, they could take that time, too, but they also could have one published in a few hours, create another tomorrow, pull the poorer performing one the day after tomorrow, etc.

If live is that frantic, can you afford to spend a week on an advert?

The lead time on a national magazine ad was usually longer than a month and they generally weren’t tied to a specific magazine’s publishing schedule— they were probably parts of longer thematic/strategic campaigns. They probably also appeared in trade rags for other tech-heavy (mechanical engineering) or tech-adjacent (finance) publications.

The real reason ads look shittier now is the marketing world shifted their investment from the ads themselves to ad targeting. You just don’t need to make great ads if you can shove them in the face of the most receptive people at the right time. It’s also not feasible to make a few great ads when your marketing team has 8 different approaches tailored to specific demographics in multiple languages.

>> back then, you have a new magazine, at best, every week, if you could afford to buy multiple or had access to a good library.

For me the lead time on my subscription was measured in months. My grandparents gave me an annual subscription from a very young age until they passed, that progressed chickadee -> owl -> popular mechanics -> compute's gazette. You used to have to wait maybe 6-8 weeks for your first issue, but at least you (typically) got the second issue in less than a month!

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. I do try to make the posts more than just "here's what the software did" otherwise someone could just crack open a manual and get the same impact.

I flip-flop on using TrueType in DOSBox-X for the blog. I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing in certain corners, and I do appreciate that. But since I'm confined to emulators, I guess I feel like I might as well take advantage of what they have to offer.

I really like that Turkish video. Do they mention the name of that particular spreadsheet?

Does DOSBox allow you to swap between TrueType and "natural" without rebooting the VM? If so you could screenshot both options and have a toggle in the post.

> I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing

A sibling comment mentioned that TrueType fonts resembled old made-up screenshots, so it might hit a different retrocomputing purity in that sense. :) I wouldn't worry too much about it.

> Do they mention the name of that particular spreadsheet?

They call it "Çizelge" (pronounced "chi-zelle-geh") on the TV show. It's just Turkish translation of "spreadsheet" so, they probably use that name to avoid advertising the brand. I checked out the screenshots, it doesn't look like 1-2-3 or VisiCalc, so, Multiplan maybe? I couldn't find any Multiplan screenshots that looks exactly like it though, but it also has a command bar below the sheet. On top left, it says the Turkish translation of "BUFFER" which also seems characteristic feature of the app, but I couldn't find an exact match. On top right, it says "OTOHESAP" which means "AUTOCALC" which might be a clue perhaps?

I don't recall any Turkish spreadsheet software from the era, so I guess that must be one of those.

The TrueType fonts might not look like the screen fonts, but weirdly, I think it works for this use because it reminds me of "screenshots" in books and manuals from the era which weren't in general literal screenshots but were often typeset mockups of screens from the programs.

That's a good point. I didn't think of looking at them like that.

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