Comments | duck2ducks: When I Was Quite Young, and Computers Were Too

duck2ducks

When I Was Quite Young, and Computers Were Too

Mar 09, 2015 11:14

Several months back I discovered a fantastic blog called The Digital Antiquarian. It's written by an author of interactive fiction (text adventures and the like), and is a compelling and astoundingly well-researched history of the early days of computers and electronic gaming. After first sketching in the very earliest days of the 1950s and 60s, ( Read more... )

Comments 5

skywind8 March 11 2015, 03:19:59 UTC

DOS is still in Windows. Start menu, type in cmd as the program to run, it'll launch a dos window. And Mac OS, of course, is now a unix, with a terminal for the command line goodness.

I've definitely seen an issue though with beginner programmers not really understanding a text-based interface. I sniff with the sadness of nostalgia and then try to teach them what they missed.

duck2ducks March 11 2015, 03:29:14 UTC

Oh, I know it has a command line interface you can pull up. But it's no longer a GUI running on top of a DOS layer; now the GUI is the native OS. (Which affects certain things, if not others.) I may have gotten a bit far afield of my point there. ;)

mathuaerknedam April 12 2015, 00:26:10 UTC

You bring back memories of all the time I spend making cool graphics (in basic?) on an Apple 2, and figuring out how to "fix" a broken DOS character editor for Wizardry. Good times ( ... )

duck2ducks April 12 2015, 06:44:59 UTC

That is an impressive 17-year gap between your first cell and your second! I'm not sure you'd find many (any?) others who have done the same. :D

duck2ducks April 12 2015, 06:47:17 UTC

Also, if you too have an interest / fond memories of older technologies, I cannot recommend highly enough that you check out the blog cited at the top. I started reading a blog post or two before going to bed most nights; to my shock, I caught up to his current writings in remarkably quick time. And I've learned so much! :D