Post #4326242

@kirtai@tech.lgbt @gwynnion@mastodon.social I believe that @kirtai@tech.lgbt puts her finger on a key issue. of course there is an aspect of nostalgia and appreciation for history, but retrocomputing is exciting and fun! in a computer like, say, the C64, one can understand almost everything if one indeed wishes to do so. the entire instruction set of the microprocessor? easy! audio and video programming? can do! SID and VIC are absolutely something that a normal human being can understand. (confession: I read about SID and VIC long ago but at the time I did not, in fact, understand them. but I believe the point stands nonetheless.) are there limitations? sure, but making something fascinating with limited resources makes success all the more sweeter. in the 90's many of us lost touch with what the computer is actually doing because the complexity became too much to handle. today, when I press a key on my work laptop, there is an extremely unpleasant delay before I see the resulting letter on the screen. (doubly so when I must work with machines remotely.) and the delay results from the simple keypress signal having to go through a ridiculously convoluted set of countless layers of abstractions. sure, in principle, I could still write, say, javascript code, like basic code in the olden times, and run it on my browser, but the connection to the machine is still irrevocably lost. there is beauty and joy in simplicity.