alt Hacker NewsDear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993
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I've been half joking lately that if I wrote an OS, I'd call it Nostalgia OS. I'd aim for a UI reminiscent of windows 98 / windows 2000 / snow leopard. With HID guidelines and a rich, clear, cohesive set of UI widgets to build applications with. I think that was the peak computing user interface - at least as I experienced it.
Of course, the kernel would be based on capabilities (probably SeL4). And applications would probably ship as WASM bundles. And I'd have a built in local first user database built around CRDTs and things instead of a file system, kinda like a modern Lotus Notes. But for the UI? That era was great.
Pre-wikipedia days means you would likely have found me hunched over a 14" VGA monitor reading articles about giant devil rays and mansa musa in Microsoft Encarta as a kid.
OP has a good point, but for me, I'd rather wish we'd skipped the 90s and picked up again much later. I like to think of the 8-bit era as an early bronze age of computing, lots of things went right and were done right.
16-bit, to me, are the dark ages. Lot's of confusion, not much good came out of it technologically and aesthetically. God, everything was ugly. Maybe all the trials and tribulations were necessary for what was about to come but I like to believe they weren't.
32-bit to me is the golden age and 64-bit is platinum.
If you offered my a time machine to go back, I'd surely say: "No, thank you!". There hasn't been a better time than now, but if you'd forced me at gun point, I'd pick the 80s over the 90s any time.
I don't think I was ever happier as a programmer than I was in the early 90s, well before university, with no thought of the internet, writing games on my Amiga.
Incidentally, I recently replayed Loom, from a bit before that era. It's still a lovely, wonderful game! Such a shame the fan-made sequel (Forge) seems to have died.
There would be no SQLite though.
The trouble I have with this proposal, is Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight and Goldeneye weren’t released until 1997. So that’s a pass from me :)
Every so often I fire up an old Squeak Smalltalk image, put it in full screen mode, and pretend that much of the intervening years never happened.
1993. No phone. No expectation of being contactable. If you are out you are out.
No SSDs though :(
Two years before I moved across into IT. This was when I was a graphic designer making magazines and nursing journals using tools like Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXpress. Those were fantastic times. It felt like we could do anything with computers.
I was eyeing a career in IT and moved across soon after, and was dumped into Novell Netware 3.12 land which was an eye opener (Fire Phasers anyone?).
Well the games of my childhood, Total Annihilation and Seven Kingdoms, came out in '97. So for my own selfish reasons I would argue that the Pentium II is where progress should have stopped.
On the other hand, at least I'll get to play Castle of the Winds.
(I also loved Z: Steel Soldiers, but despite the '01 release date, I'm sure it too would have run on a Pentium II).
2009, please, sorry. 1993 is fun and all, I can go relive the dreams of Microsoft Encarta, but 2009 has Mac OS 10.6, gigabit ethernet everywhere, and USB.
I was doing Modula 2 coding of assignments around then on 1 bit xterms. [1] I don't think we had that new fangled Modula 3.
[1] possibly NCD-16, https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.x/c/yGBvXhuTL0Y
Time lords can’t do anything, they’re all dead (twice now, thanks RTD)
Maybe the doctor could take you back there with a TARDIS, but time paradoxes and fixed points in time and all that
I'm old enough to remember the 1990s. Many of us who do consider it the last good decade. Living was cheap. The previously ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had seemingly abated. This was before the d0t-com crash and obviously the War on Terror that has dominated the 21st century thus far.
I have fond memories of the 486 era, which was really the early 1990s. I'm kinda surprised the PC component of this isn't mentioned here. it was also peak Borland.
It does mention Windows NT but honestly nobody really cared about that until NT 3.0/3.5 and it soon thereafter became Windows XP and laid the foundation for modern Windows.
1993 IIRC had pre-1.0 Linux. I downloaded a distribution (SLS) onto ~30 5.25" floppy drives about that time.
But I really wonder if it was that the tech was sufficiently good at that time or it's simply the tech we had when life was sufficiently good. 1993 was before the dot-com bubble started. That's true. And I guess with more computing power came a lot of the things that many people dislike now. Ads, news feeds, social media, micro-transactions, etc.
But we also have Youtube, video streaming, digital maps and navigation, search engines and a host of other things that are genuinely good.
This stuff was also fantastically expensive (in inflation-adjusted dollars). We shouldn't forget that too.
I honestly don't share the nostalgia.
I enjoy having a computer that allows me to create all kinds of things that weren't possible in 1993 ... mash together all kinds of audio, video, text ... put it in a backpack, bring it somewhere, perform on stage, with an 800$ laptop. Amazing.
I'm one of those "Encarta kids" who dug through Encarta for nights on end while the parents were out, and still spend slow Sundays reading random Wikipedia articles.
Having the archives that have been created since 1993, whether Wikipedia, Youtube (to me still one of the most amazing music discovery tools I've ever encountered), Archive.org, Google Scholar, Zenodo, at my fingertips has probably widened my personal horizon beyond imagination. Not sure who I'd be without it.
So even sadder to see it all drown now in AI slop ...
I've been decompiling SH-2A code for the past half-decade and, you know, it's fine. It's not Great. But, like, it's fine!
In Gallifrey? In Gallifrey.
[dead]
I was in school, and I remember my 1993. Our school was one of the few schools in my hometown (north-east India) that got computers.
Unfortunately, we had too many students for each computer during classes. I started a revolt that “Computers are wasting our study time, as our upcoming board exams are more important.” The whole class signed the petition and the School Head had to schedule a class-wide talk and agreed to make it totally optional to the point of, “If you really want, you be part of it. But yes, study for the exam is more important.”
So, the computer classes ended up with just me (the traitor), a friend from Kerala, and the school head’s daughter. We ended up like 3 computers each to our disposal. I wrote a QBasic Game-ish program to impress my first girlfriend — she uses the arrow keys to launch dots to hit some area on a heart-shaped thingy on the screen and it prints her name. I remember using physical graph-paper to calculate the screen “pixels” (I think) or co-ordinates to calculate strike areas.
Oh and Yes, almost all of my classmates remember me for being that traitor.
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/fixing-a-dos-computer-for-the-ar...