Allen wrote:
Too me, I think people using computers now are spoiled. You have pretty GUIs, a mouse for everything, and NO ONE actually HAS to learn coding to use one.
I like using a GUI, becaue well, text pron sucks, and I like watching video, and being on Gaim, and Kopete, but as for right now, I have Amarok playing a play list and I'm on Gaim and Kopete, but I'm in a VC text only checking my E-Mail.
Do you agree that kids now have it easy? Including me of course, I got my first computer 5 years ago and just started using UNIX based OSs a year ago. I don't have to learna nything, I can just click and drool on the keyboard. I'm quite tired of it really.
I feel I've missed out on the golden days of PCs because of a GUI. People who have beeb on computers longer have it better, you guys know how to code, you know networking inside and out and your OS inside and out. I had to force myself to learn all that. I still can't program for crap, and I'll blame that on GUIs too, because lookign at older computers and thwe web pages that talk about them, everyone knew how to code in at least basic, and in the 70s, even Macs came with Hex. I feel like a GUI is nothing more than a bondage instrument to hold you down.
I bought my first computer, an IMSAI 8080, in Nov. 1976. This was a kit, where the components came in plastic bags and had to be soldered onto the circuit boards etc. It came with no software and even memory was an extra cost option. I had to write my own device drivers to get the hardware to work. At one point I even designed and built from scratch, and 8 port serial I/O card. There were no disk drives, just a couple of audio cassette drives, which could zip along at 300 bits/second. Back in those days, you really knew your computer, inside out. Also, back in those days, we had to whittle our own chips from wood... ;-)