Monday 21 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What was better in the golden age of tech (a.k.a. the grumpy thread)

Ask HN: What was better in the golden age of tech (a.k.a. the grumpy thread)
22 by rixed | 16 comments on Hacker News.
Not that progress should be denied entirely , but I often think that the past gets discarded too quickly and many good ideas got lost with the bath water. I'm certainly not the only one to feel that way. So I'm wondering what such good ideas that have disappeared can other HNers remember. I'll start: In the golden age of sun stations, the BIOS was written in forth, and the ROM contained a forth interpreter. Not only all extension cards ROM was interpreted and therefore all extension cards were architecture independent, but you were given a Forth REPL to tinker around the boot process, or in fact at any later point once the system had started with a special key combination. That was in my opinion way ahead of the modern BIOSes, even taking into account OpenBIOS. Your turn?

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