Change in computers as a hobbiest... 2838

Morten Reistad

You're talking about multi-user operating systems, running on hardware that only companies could afford. That's a very different viewpoint.

I can see perfectly well how the 80s was a "dark age" from the viewpoint of someone who had to administer computer systems at work, but that's not what I was talking about. What I was talking about was the home computer revolution - the idea that ordinary people can actually have computers at home, keep them running themselves, and even do something useful with them. (You wouldn't have expected to run Tops-20 at your home back in the 70s, would you? Or even if you would, how about your aunt, mom, or a random 8-year-old kid?)

Yes, but workplaces and their computer systems are really a parallel universe. Even if you were in hibernation during the 80s, gnawing your teeth at the horror-that-is-known-as-MS-DOS, waiting for the "real" operating systems to appear, somewhere along the way you accepted the thought that people can actually run this stuff at their homes, without having any special training, computer rooms, blinkenlights, and operators in lab coats. (Maybe you never resisted that thought, either, but I can't imagine anyone would have considered it reasonable or practical to have your mom and dad run an operating system like UNIX at ordinary homes back in the late 70s, much less buying beefy enough hardware for that.)

Then again, I had a pre-emptively mulbreastasking operating system with long filenames, device drivers, filesystems, shared libaries, GUI, shell, etc. on my desktop in 1987. With a flat 32-bit address space. Those who bought the earlier model of the Amiga already had this all in 1985. This was at home, on affordable hardware - not a special out-of-the-reach-for-ordinary-people workstation purchased by an employer. In my opinion, the revolution happened in the 80s: even kids could afford to buy that kind of advanced machine for home - they had a choice, instead of having to rely on the earlier, crude MS-DOS-like stuff or 8-bit machines with a BASIC interpreter. Linus just took the necessary steps to make it possible to run something bearable on the i386 hardware as well, but he wasn't the first to bring these features at home. (Linux only came out in 1991 and started to reach AmigaOS-level "full functionality" perhaps in 1995, or so - ten years after AmigaOS was first released.)

Don't get me wrong: AmigaOS wasn't the be-all, end-all, but for me, at least, it was a serious eye-opener back in 1987: you can really do this stuff, mulbreastasking, multimedia (even when the whole buzzword wasn't yet invented!), inter-process messaging and scripting, realistic color graphics and all, at home. Elegantly. Without resorting to ugly kludges built on the top of some CP-M clone, and without needing to buy big iron or workstations that only companies can afford.

That day was different because you could now do it at home, without resorting to company resources. That was my point. The whole 80s, Commodore 64s, Ataris, Amigas and all, paved the way for that.

Bad parts? Technically, yes:

The whole concept of "Web BBSes" is, technically and user interface-wise, a disgrace to the real BBSes, so I haven't paid much attention to the content. In fact, I'm surprised they can even have any content and discussions at all, which such a lousy user interface. PhpBB et al., they're inventing the wheel again... badly. I'd much rather see BBSes based on the NNTP protocol, but with mandatory registration and login.

I see just the opposite here. There is a particularly persistent troll terrorizing my native netnews hierarchy (sfnet.*) right now. It has been going on for a couple of years now, and caused a real decline in quality. Several former regulars have left in disgust, or minimized their presence. He roams free in the whole hierarchy, uses automated scripts (randomly changing names, etc.) and numerous randomly chosen free providers to his advantage, and I really wish there were FidoNet style SysOp controls in place to deal with the situation.

-- znark