I had a c64 and it was what made me fall in love with computers.
I tried my friends recently and it really did feel like a joy- it’s basically a toy now, impossible to use for anything meaningful (even IRC).
It’s hard to convey in text the “feeling” of immediacy and low input lag. I suppose it’s similar to how some gamers talk about fps, it feels immersive, like the machine is in-tune with you. It genuinely feels like something mechanical that you’re interacting with rather than something that “will get to it”.
I would posit that our definition of 'meaningful' has dramatically changed since the C64 days. Nowadays, if you aren't doing it online or collaborating with someone, it's not considered 'meaningful.' Back in 1983, this was not the case.
I think a better comparison would be to do the things a C64 was good at on a modern computer with modern workflows, and see which is easier/faster/more satisfying. I'm talking word processing, gaming, printing, etc.
I bet the C64 wins.
(Side note: you can get that C64 online and onto IRC or a telnet-enabled BBS; there are plenty of products to do that)
It feels in tune until the moment you hit Return, generally. Then the machine has to do actual calculation, and you're reminded of the clock speeds you're dealing with.
Yes, I have very low latency while I type RUN EXCEL, but who cares when the floppy disk access that comes next takes 20 seconds?
Floppies?? In our days, We had to make weird and loud sounds into the cassette recorder, and then see if what we made actually played alright. Took 'bout 5 whole minutes each LOAD "", unless someone took a breather, I'd wager!
Yeah but you still feel like the machine's working, right? you get this immediate crunching or a light blinking immediately.
I said that throughput is significantly worse, for sure.. but when I open a program theres about a second where it seems like my computers doing nothing at all..
Websites too, click a link and it seems like nothing until the page goes blank and starts rendering the new site.
Most laptops don't have harddisk indicators, all indication of work has gone away, and rendering it to the screen takes time- and isn't often followed anyway.
This is true. Apple, in particular, is aware of this; iOS has specific visual indicators designed in to make it look like the machine is doing work even when it's just loading state. It was one of the distinguishing factors between the iPhone and Android user experiences early on.
I was alive in 1983. I've used computers from that era, and I've used lots of point-of-sale and 3270 interfaces, because I came to software engineering by a route that involved a goodly number of menial day jobs early on. If you had an MBNA credit card and called customer service about it between early 2000 and mid-2001, you might have talked to me, and I probably waived your goddam late fee because that was policy to keep generally on-time-paying customers feeling good about the company.
The author of that thread is exactly right, and also kind of wrong.
They're exactly right that modern interfaces, web ones most especially, suck super bad. (I'm a web dev, I'm not disclaiming responsibility here.)
They're kind of wrong in that modern interfaces are built over enormously more complex datasets and problem domains than those to which they compare them. I mean, yeah, a Wyse-50 in a library was fast as hell at what it could do, but try getting it to show you a map, like, at all. I'm not even sure those things were character-addressable, so, good luck with that!
UI design as a concept doesn't get enough love in our very young industry. It's as complex, difficult, and necessary a discipline as software engineering, but we mostly just have software engineers build UI as an afterthought and if it sucks, oh well, so does everyone else's, and it doesn't obviously drive revenue anyway. I blame capitalism.
1983 was they year when I got into computers and programming, and I am 100% with the author here.
We have expanded the scope, to be sure, in that time but we've done it without a very deep understanding of the fundamental processes and so, in short, we've made a mess of it. We were in such a rush to make the perfect not the enemy of the good, that what we have isn't even really good anymore.
While I agree with the sentiment, the comparison is unfair and inaccurate. Everything on computers today didn't exist in 1983, particularly his concrete web example. A better title would be "some things on computers today are slower that other things on computers in 1983". Not so attention grabbing though, so why even go on Twitter. Almost everything on Twitter was better in 1983.
This being said, programming today is no longer about efficiency and quality, it has been taken over by code monkeys that will happily copy/paste encyclopedia sized code pieces and put them together in something vaguely functional, under a culture of move fast and break things, because companies want to sell shiny trinkets as "interesting features", and users want to buy that. And modern hardware is good enough to take a lot of this pieced together software so why even bother?
Not almost! Everything was better in 1983. Everything already existed. Twitter is a good example: A really shitty newsgroup server glued onto a unusable client. Its eternal September on steroids. What a joke!
