13 posts tagged “retro”
On Sunday, the x86 architecture turns 30! This is the classic "PC" architecture, but now runs Macs, as well as many of the servers on the Internet. I dare say that the vast majority of the servers my company hosts are x86 based.
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Then, off to college, where we learn Pascal or C, and that GOTO is considered harmful.
Finally, in the real world, Perl does the programming chores.
You can still try out BASIC, if you are so inclined.
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The text and a scan of a 1970s Life magazine article, showing a family using a computer in the home for several odd things. They rocked the BASIC, it would seem. No mention of Twitter.
As part of the introduction of a new blend, Starbucks has one of their older logos on their cups. It's almost like the one at the original Pike's Place store when I went a few years ago, though this is a bit more discrete.
Some people are Civil War re-enactors. Others get into Steampunk. I've decided to take up historical Information Technology re-enactment. I'm calling it Web 0.2. I confess this was inspired, in part, by watching "Wargames" the other evening. Like Steampunk, it may involve using historical techniques in a contemporary setting. I wrote a command-line utility to update Twitter, for instance.
Another angle is historical reproduciton. Like Civil War or Renaissance re-enactors, it would involve finding relatively historically accurate reproductions--for instance, emulation of historical technology (I'm not about to build my own data center for this, after all (my wife probably be concerned). One tool I found to do this is GLTerminal. It's been out for a while, but someone put up a pretty good port of it for Leopard. It is a terminal program for OS X--basically, a program to give you a command prompt.
For the basic enter-commands-at-prompt functions, it really is no different than the terminal program that comes with OS X--in fact, there may be a few odds and ends it lacks. However, the Web 0.2 angle comes in with the "Classic Terminal" setting. Here, it will emulate some of the visual quirks of older dumb terminals. My job at Miami was, in part, supporting a system fed by these.
Visual quirks--a "fisheye" screen and noticeable flicker is one thing. To really get the feel of working on a VAX late at night from your dorm room, there is "baudrate simulation." Where our contemporary DSL connections give us 763 Kbs, you can pretend you are working with your system at 2 Kbs (or less). Here is a screencast of GLTerminal in action.
There are a few quicks to the program, and it is Mac only. However, it is a neat way to get nostalgic.
Happy Birthday, C64!
For those wanting to relive the glory, VICE is nice. And, you can find a lot of the retro software.
What I find quite surprising is that people are still developing for it. Someone ported vi to it (obviously not EMACS). Someone else did a web browser. For the ultimate in retro experience, Commodore One is building motherboards that fit into contemporary cases (and peripherals).
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It was on this Commodore 64 that I first encountered a spell checker. By today's standards, it was crude. Once you typed your document in the word processor and save it, you would exit the word processor, flip the disk over, and load the spell checker. It would go through and examine the document for errors. Several minutes later (remember, this was a Commodore 64 and a 5.25 inch floppy disk drive), the errors would be highlighted. You could correct each one.
It was not the most user-friendly thing. If the same word was misspelled the same way each time, you still had to change each word. It did not offer suggestions--you had to figure out the correct spelling. If you were a bad speller, you'd ask your dad, who would tell you to look it up in the dictionary.
Bad spellers everywhere knows how frustrating that sounds. After all, if I had a good enough idea how to spell a word that I could look it up, I wouldn't be asking. English doesn't lend itself to easily finding words. After all, you don't flip to "N" to find "knife" or "pneumatics."
In the early nineties, I got to try something better. Symantec's Q&A, WordPerfect, and others all had the spell checkers integrated into the same program! It would walk you from word to word. It would offer suggestions! You could say "replace all!" These seemed great!
However, there was one big glitch: you ran it as a separate step. If you forgot, or made a tweak after running it, you were at risk of, at worst, wasting paper. More often, I embarrassed myself in front of my coworkers.
Salvation was on its way. A little innovation, twelve years ago, came. It came from Microsoft of all places! Word 95 introduced interactive spell checking. As you type, the spelling would be checked. If you typed something wrong, it would put a red squiggle underneath it. You could fix it right there.
This was incredible to me! It was not a hassle! It was always there! Not only that, but I think that, as a consequence of seeing my errors as I make them, I've learned to spell better. This, I think, is the greatest benefit--otherwise, it would just be a crutch.
As the red squiggle moved into other programs (such as web browsers), I've come to appreciate it, and proper spelling, more and more. Where I used to get frustrated with people telling me to "look it up," I know see the value.
It's not perfect. If I misspell a word in such a fashion as it's a different word, or select the wrong suggestion, I wind up putting "damnation" instead of "dalmatian." If the word is not in the standard dictionary, there are either unlikely suggestions, or no suggestions (fortunately, Google will often ask, "did you mean." For instance, "did you mean Achilles' heel?").
I would not be surprised if there were errors in this post. But I can post confident I won't look completely illiterate.
One phrase jumped out at me: "Computer time was too expensive to waste." I heard that before, having read books explaining how computers would run 24x7, with users scheduling a precious hour where they could. This was more in the fifties and sixties, the legendary days when the computer was as big as a room, and nowhere near as powerful as a Commodore 64.
The phrase explained why operating systems came about--to manage tasks and devices. Taking a break in processing to mount and unmount tape was a wasteful use of time. For whatever reason, that struck me as amazing. It makes sense, once you think about it.
However, I was reading this on the bus while listening to an MP3 player. I knew that there were three computers at my house turned off, and my work system sitting idle at my desk. A guy across from me was playing a video game on a laptop. Any one of these devices was orders of magnitudes more powerful than anything that was around when UNIX was born--supercomputers, really. And here we were, wasting them on music, games, or--heaven forbid--turning them off!
I remember being described as the first computer generation--those who grew up with computers around them. I'm not sure that's quite apt. We had them, but they were just on the cusp of being usable to most people. So, I often marvel at how far we have come.
I look at my daughter, three years old and using a mouse, as someone who really couldn't appreciate the ubiquity of computers in the twenty-first century. Though futurists were wrong about jetpacks, they got that one right. They just didn't realize how wasteful we would become with them.
