The glorious inelegance of the 1990s family computer

boing
83

Of all the things to complain about Apple, I find that a odd choice.

As a Mac-using video editor, I find ProRes (their proprietary low-compression, processor-friendly editing video format) to allow for an excellent Final Cut workflow even on a lower spec Mac Mini. Using a Blackmagic Cinema Camera with native ProRes support helps a lot too, compared to smaller-file but processor-intensive DSLR recording standards like AVCHD and h264.

More to the point, I find no difficulty at all to playing or converting non-Apple video files. The comes-free-with-the-machine iMovie editor may not natively support every oddball file you throw at it, but there’s very little your mac won’t work with with some open source help from the likes of VLC Player and the Handbrake converter. Same goes for Windows, I’m guessing, since these tools tend to be multi-platform. I’d bet Windows Movie Maker or whatever Linux folks edit on are no paragons of file compatibility either.

So it seems your experience isn’t mine at all. Unless you strayed completely from the PC narrative and said “Apple” meaning “iPhones and iPads don’t play well with .ogg or .wmv or whatever compared to my Android thingamabob or some platonic ideal”. In which case, yeah, they sure don’t.

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I have to wonder sometimes about how jaded folks are. I love articles like this. I was in my 20’s during this period, and I could code autoexec.bat and config.sys files like a demon. Yeah, some of the details are slightly mis-remembered, but he was a kid, so I’d expect that. Hell, I was an adult and I can’t remember half the shit I knew back then. But I do remember building my own systems, and hard disks (yes, we sometimes called those small ones hard disks to differentiate them from the larger floppies), and the pain of installing Windows 95 (but I waited a year, expecting the bugs, which turned out to be a good choice) and the sweet sound of modem magic. Plus running to unplug the damn thing whenever there was a storm.

It’s just a lovely piece of nostalgia, can’t we let it be what it is without wrapping it with our own baggage.

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I fondly remember my first 1990’s powerhouse system - a 486 DX 33. It even had a turbo button you could press to disable the math co-processor which was very useful when you ran DOS games. With it on you simply could not press the keys fast enough to keep your ostrich in the air when playing a game of Joust. I had tried Windows 2 and 3.x on it so when Windows 95 came out I never loaded it on my red boxed data rocket. It ran DOS and never crashed at all. It was never a problem. I could surf the Wildcat BBS’s, run DOOM, and crush Tetris. It was no Amiga but it was fun. Maybe the writers father wasn’t so adept with PC architecture as they remember.

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86

You don’t… the player isn’t Carmen Sandiego. The player is chasing Carmen Sandiego. That’s the whole point - the title isn’t Where in the World Are You?. The entire plot of the game is about what priceless historical artifact or landmark Carmen has stolen and how to track her down.

Did people seriously not understand that? They made a popular kids TV show that ran for 4 years, it’s not like it was an obscure property.

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My family had the 6100/66 DOS Compatible, which was nice for games.

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The author is distinctly pro-Apple, tho.

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Which no doubt is why so many seemed to have such knee jerk reactions and never finished it. Much of it turned out to be a nice, nostalgic piece that painted a somewhat loving picture of early pc days, but I have to admit my knee jerked, too, at the Windows-is-an-ugly-clunky-crashing-mess but Mac’s-are-problem-free-utopias-of-perfection parts. (But any article that glibly compares installing Windows to descending into hell always gets my eyes rolling…)

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90

Yeah, I liked this piece a lot. It’s more about her dad and family, really, than any particular computer.

Your first computer is a lot like your first car. My first car was objectively an old, unreliable piece of junk. It was also the best and I still miss it.

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'87, baby!

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92

A long while back, I came to a realization: computers exist less to be personally exciting, than being tools one can use to solve problems (unless you find that exciting, which I admit I still sometimes do). But if Apple truly represents “bland ubiquity”, it’s not like there isn’t an entire industry which could challenge them on this. Why not demand something different from it?

Is it really smugness that folk might want to spend less time fixing and more time just doing the things? I suppose just saying that out loud makes anyone sound “smug”, though I can’t for the life of me understand why.

But when people say “X didn’t work as well” that means they may be describing their experience. If you did not have that experience, then it probably doesn’t apply to you.

Never played or seen a frame. I’ve heard of it of course, but the premise didn’t fall within my interests.

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93

I remember around 2007, my Dell had broken and I was about to order a new one, when I talked to a guy in a small computer store, and it turned out he could build me a similar computer for about the same price. I was surprised, but now I get all my computer needs from him, and I’m very happy to pay him to do something I could theoretically do myself.

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Simple productivity PCs are so cheap and easy to build these days it’s silly. Everything is on one integrated board, even wifi. Add HD or SSD and memory and you’re done and ready to install your OS. Drivers are rarely an issue, unless you’ve got a really old printer or scanner.

I got my 1st PC built by a place on Canal St in lower Manhattan that mostly sold E-junk. In 1990 it was $2k for a 286 with a mono monitor, a 20mb HD and a floppy. I had to spend another $200 for a math co-processor chip so I could run CAD. I had promised a client that I would do draftings of what I had designed for them, and I was damned if I was going to do it all by hand, so I learned CAD. I think I bought the next one and built the one after that.

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Maybe Apple’s better with video formats nowadays, but Quicktime sure used to be plenty obnoxious. There are still a couple of old PC games out there that require Quicktime and are likely to complain mightily unless you have exactly the right period-correct version of Quicktime installed. What a relief in the latter days when Quicktime Alternative became available and you could at least get the necessary codecs without wrangling Apple’s installer.

Of course, I suppose RealPlayer wasn’t much better at the time.

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I dropped a box of punched cards on the way to the mainframe one day.

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You didn’t miss much. IIRC it only ran on one hardware configuration to begin with so it was a bit rare. I only saw/touched it once.

I’m jealous that you have a NeXT. It still kinda stuns me that everything I did on a NeXT Cube did back in the late 80s is what I’m doing in 2017 on a Mac.

I had a Sun 3/60 box that used a 680x0 chip running SunOS.[quote=“fnordius, post:74, topic:100219”]
Sosumi.
[/quote]

I see what you did there…

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That caused a visceral reaction.
1977. My program. Gone.
Still hurts.

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I feel that way about the VAX robotic production systems I used to program in the 80s. 64-bit machines with massbus interconnects, positional intelligence multiprocessing logic based on bird flocking behavior… but the thing is, today’s computers are cheap. I build mine from discarded garbage, they cost nothing but time.

I enjoyed the article for a lot of reasons and I hope my children look back on their “engineer’s engineer” dad with as much fondness some day.

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For the price of an Apple PC I can put up with some hassles. Throw in the freedom you get with Linux and Apples are just pretty toys that won’t make my desk look any nicer.

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There’s a bit more too them than that. I use Windows (3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP begrudgingly, 7, 8.1, and 10), Linux (starting back in the days before Mandrake got weird all the way through now), and Mac (System 7, System 9, and OS X). For day to day use, I’m happiest with Mac OS X but I’m closer to an expert on the Windows platform.

What’s really really nice about Mac over Linux is … Apple actually cares about and studies user experience. I can step into the terminal and run bash like any proper modern *NIX system when I need or want to use a command line but the rest of it just gets out of my way and lets me do what I needed or wanted to do. The key combinations make more sense and usually apply more evenly across applications. The trackpad gestures are brilliant. Heck, I thought I hated trackpads until I bought my first Mac. It’s such a step up in experience I don’t connect a mouse unless I’m doing some graphic design work.

I built a Windows 10 PC last year. It’s a lot better than it used to be. The OS install process was as close to painless as it’s ever been for Windows. I still have my complaints but Microsoft is trying and, privacy concerns aside, Windows 10 is a nice solid entry.

On the Linux end, it’s the same business it’s always been. Still the same fights over sound subsystems and wireless drivers for several-years-old mainstream enterprise model laptops. Still GUIs hand crafted in the fires of mount Gnome. I use Linux to host webservers etc. in my house. If I was going to set up a kiosk for public use, I’d do it on a Raspberry Pi with a heavily modified Jessie install.

But for my every day writing, graphic design, web development, surfing the internet, etc. needs, Linux is not the OS I want to be using.

Bringing it back around to nostalgia, I don’t miss anything in the Windows end newer than Windows 2000. Getting a copy of Weezer’s Buddy Holly with every new computer was pretty neat at the time. I’m glad I had my late 90s, early 2000s experiences with Linux but I don’t feel any nostalgia over them at all. I wouldn’t mind having a System 7 Mac sitting around to play the old HyperCard game, Scarab of Ra. I miss my already-ancient-when-I-inherited-it Commodore 128 some days. :cold_sweat: Oh, and I really really miss WordPerfect 6.1.

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Of all the computer tat Ive received over the years, the one loss I regret was my blue WordPerfect mini swiss army knife.

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