software is a mirror that reflects the times and the environment it was created in.
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@morgan @psf
This. People used to be proud of the software they created! And for good reasons too.I have fond memories of C64 GEOS by Berkeley Softworks which later became GeoWorks. There was an interview in I think Compute's Gazette on their work on GEOS, how their engineers would take a routine and try to shave off clock cycles and bytes of memory use. And do it several times per each routine. It was such an amazing environment on the ridiculously constrained hardware. And now we have emulators for that stuff running inside the browser, consuming several gigabytes of memory.
One of the fondest memories of it is a when I returned a larger history homework project written with GeoWrite (I think in 1990), and the teacher asked me to stay after class for a chat. I was dreading some disciplining, although wasn't sure for what. Instead he was genuinely amazed at the print quality and just wanted to know what equipment I had used to do it. He was something between flabbergasted and disbelief when I told him it was entirely done on a Commodore 64. He said his expensive new PC couldn't produce anything like it.
What I didn't tell him was that GeoWrite didn't have scandinavian letters, so I had to add the dots over ä and ö manually 😄
@Turre @psf we really did think we were going to change the world, at #GeoWorks. Everyone was young. Our most successful hiring practice was to recruit interns from the University of California at Berkeley, basically across the road. These third-year electrical engineering / computer science students would work for us for six months, get credit and pay, work on really cool software and hardware, then we'd make some a job offer, and many would accept. I worked with the smartest people, there. I learned so much. I came in the "wrong way"; self-taught. I'm still friends with many of them. I'm glad you had a good experience with our software! It was a labor of love. Some made some money, most gained valuable experience. A few went on to greatness. A bit of trivia; Eric Schmidt (Google) was on our board, later in the game...
Cc @lahosken @witort @witort@mastodon.social Did I get it right?
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@Turre @psf we really did think we were going to change the world, at #GeoWorks. Everyone was young. Our most successful hiring practice was to recruit interns from the University of California at Berkeley, basically across the road. These third-year electrical engineering / computer science students would work for us for six months, get credit and pay, work on really cool software and hardware, then we'd make some a job offer, and many would accept. I worked with the smartest people, there. I learned so much. I came in the "wrong way"; self-taught. I'm still friends with many of them. I'm glad you had a good experience with our software! It was a labor of love. Some made some money, most gained valuable experience. A few went on to greatness. A bit of trivia; Eric Schmidt (Google) was on our board, later in the game...
Cc @lahosken @witort @witort@mastodon.social Did I get it right?
@Turre @psf @lahosken @witort @witort@mastodon.social one more notable GeoWorks alumnus; Curtis Yarvin.
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@Turre @psf @lahosken @witort @witort@mastodon.social one more notable GeoWorks alumnus; Curtis Yarvin.
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@Turre @psf @lahosken @witort @witort@mastodon.social one more notable GeoWorks alumnus; Curtis Yarvin.
@morgan @psf @lahosken @witort@sfba.social @witort@mastodon.social
I remember seeing the news of GEOS ported to the PC and thinking, that is going to wipe everything else off the floor. It should have!That was one my first lessons on just how unfair that industry is.
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software is a mirror that reflects the times and the environment it was created in.
this is why much software created in the 1970s counterculture was joyful and humanistic, and why much software created in the 2020s capitalistic hellscape is soul-crushing malware (adware, spyware).
#retrocomputing can mean celebrating hardware limitations and creative coding, but it can also mean celebrating personal computing - computers that are tools for liberation - bicycles for the mind, not cattle trains to the slop farm.
@psf oof. This is Conway’s Law writ large, I think. I had noticed this, thank you so much for sharing.
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@morgan @psf @lahosken @witort@sfba.social @witort@mastodon.social
I remember seeing the news of GEOS ported to the PC and thinking, that is going to wipe everything else off the floor. It should have!That was one my first lessons on just how unfair that industry is.
@Turre @psf @lahosken @witort @witort@mastodon.social when Microsoft introduced Windows, we were on a project with IBM's Eduquest division, and that began a conversation about a project called which would be called 'Baseball,' which was the idea of bolting on PC GEOS as the gui on top of IBM's PC-DOS. Never happened. (Baseball breaks Windows.)
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software is a mirror that reflects the times and the environment it was created in.
this is why much software created in the 1970s counterculture was joyful and humanistic, and why much software created in the 2020s capitalistic hellscape is soul-crushing malware (adware, spyware).
#retrocomputing can mean celebrating hardware limitations and creative coding, but it can also mean celebrating personal computing - computers that are tools for liberation - bicycles for the mind, not cattle trains to the slop farm.
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@psf@oldbytes.space literally the worst take ive read all day, shit sucked then too!!!!
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@psf@oldbytes.space literally the worst take ive read all day, shit sucked then too!!!!
@psf@oldbytes.space go meet non general purpose programmers for the love of god
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@psf@oldbytes.space go meet non general purpose programmers for the love of god
@psf@oldbytes.space or just read microserfs or literally any sociological text
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@psf@oldbytes.space or just read microserfs or literally any sociological text
@jack thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify my take, because the "past good, future bad" framing was probably the weakest part of it.
my actual point is that software is the product of its environment. software created in a repressive environment reflects the greed and paranoia of its creators.
there are plenty of examples of this in the past; Microsoft were greedy and paranoid, David Ahl and the Creative Computing crew weren't, and when you use their software, the difference is stark. today there is still plenty of software (usually FOSS) that hasn't been dragged down by extractive greed. however, pretty much all of the dominant players have succumbed to the perverse calling of adtech and data brokerage. there are people entering the field today who have never seen a website without targeted ads, an operating system without always-on telemetry, or a video game without microtransactions, and it's mainly #retrocomputing heads who are in the position to point out these thing are a product of the fucked up environment we live in, not an inherent trait of software, and that we can do better when creating new software.
put another way, retrocomputing is the most interesting to me when it isn't just based on blind nostalgia for the past, but instead focuses on understanding what past systems Got Right and what use we can still make of them today.
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software is a mirror that reflects the times and the environment it was created in.
this is why much software created in the 1970s counterculture was joyful and humanistic, and why much software created in the 2020s capitalistic hellscape is soul-crushing malware (adware, spyware).
#retrocomputing can mean celebrating hardware limitations and creative coding, but it can also mean celebrating personal computing - computers that are tools for liberation - bicycles for the mind, not cattle trains to the slop farm.
@psf Also, the War On Drugs shifting the pattern of popular programming chemicals towards those whose users would be happier to vote for Nixon might have been a factor, especially if one considers What the Dormouse Said a creditable source.
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