The IDEs we had 30 years ago... and we lost
I grew up learning to program in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Back then, I did not fully comprehend what I was doing and why the tools I used were impressive given the constraints of the hardware we had. Having gained more knowledge throughout the years, it is now really fun to pick up DOSBox to re-experience those programs and compare them with our current state of affairs. This time around, I want to look at the pure text-based IDEs that we had in that era before Windows eclipsed the PC industry. I want to do this because those IDEs had little to envy from the IDEs of today—yet it feels as if we went through a dark era where we lost most of those features for years and they are only resurfacing now. If anything, stay for a nostalgic ride back in time and a little rant on “bloat”. But, more importantly, read on to gain perspective on what existed before so that you can evaluate future feature launches more critically.
December 25, 2023
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<a href="/tags/blogsystem5">blogsystem5</a>, <a href="/tags/history">history</a>
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12 minutes)
Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines
The computers of yesteryear had this little feature known as blinking LED lights 🔆. They also had this other feature called noisy disks 💾 and loud fans 🪭. Uh wait. Features? Why “features” and not “annoyances”?! 🧵👇 Front panel of a common PC case in the late 1990s. My Pentium MMX 166 was hosted in one of these. You see, these bright lights and loud noises acted as canaries 🐦 in a performance mine. They gave developers a chance to notice when things were off performance-wise. If your code abused the CPU or the hard disk by mistake, you could tell right away.
December 15, 2023
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<a href="/tags/blogsystem5">blogsystem5</a>, <a href="/tags/history">history</a>, <a href="/tags/twitter-thread">twitter-thread</a>
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5 minutes)
A CLI text editor? In my Windows?
It’s more likely than you think! In a surprising twist of events, Microsoft is exploring the addition of a command-line (CLI) text editor to Windows. If you ask me, not having a CLI text editor on Windows is mind-boggling: you can access a Windows machine via SSH these days, so not having an editor that works in the console is a big handicap for remote system administration. So, should Windows bundle a CLI text editor? Of course it should.
December 8, 2023
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<a href="/tags/history">history</a>, <a href="/tags/windows">windows</a>
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7 minutes)
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