... We never left the command line?
What if, due to some quirk of fate we remained in the column-based textual interface?
What kind of form would computing have taken if we were to think what kind of developments would have been enacted, the same way that GUIs have become more and more animated and aesthetically minded?
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HOLY SHIT DUDE I THINK YOU JUST STUMBLED ONTO A REVOLUTIONARY IDEA I HAVENT SEEN ANYONE POST ANYTHINK LIKE THIS BEFORE OMG MIND BLOWN
>install elinks fag
No, we're not doing your homework for you.
it would still be bloated and horrible to use, thanks to normies ruining everything with their --big-ass-flags-that-do-nothing
op should go back to alt.reddit
>we remained in the column-based textual interface
Eventually it would become more finegrained than the common Unix terminal emulation, allowing better fonts, more font hints, proportional better fonts, embedded things wtc in it. But it would still be hindered by the layout assumption.
All kinds of shitty extension would be made by the emulator vendors.
TL;DR: It would become something similar to web layout/style.
/thread
>javascript bloat at the command line
Oh God, please no.
^[{function(){ return new Color(() => red); }^[}
Yes, it will become part of the standard to embed js in escape sequences, among other things like font and style. But wait, there's more! You'll also have tables and headings and stylesheets! Markdown is rendered right in the tty, you can simply cat your .md files. With js, there will be a turing-complete stylesheets language and xml-like markup language for defining terminal structures inside escape sequences.
All computers have this standard, so Unicode has only fixed-size characters for it. Instead of cool female engineer emojis, Unicode has thousands of different line-drawing characters, for making pretty terminal graphics. So your Reactive terminals will look the same on all platforms, MS-DOS, Macintosh and Nokia!
To keep users dissatisfied with their terminal's performance, we will increase the amount of escape sequences. More scripts and more drawing features over time.
B-b-but Sup Forums told be CLIs were anti-normie.
>go to site
>blank
>[[this site requires ANSI-TXT3.6]]
>enable it
>glowing rainbow color cycling figlet font exploding and remaking itself every few seconds
I love when you go to a document and it takes over your framebuffer resolution to show a giant breastfeeding mother that's bouncing around over your curser that's now filling the screen because you haven't upgraded to the package that allows multiple font sizes.
Oh, and did I forget to tell you about the ads? In this world where command line took over, you'll read all the notifications and ads on the terminal, but you don't have to type anything! They'll just pop up whatever you're doing. This interrupts most programs that have a TUI, so you'll need to redraw. It's a bit annoying when ads and TUIs have different colors so your screen switches from black to white and then black again. Often you can change the colors but in some rare cases you can't. In MS-DOS 10.0 you can't disable ads and notifications permanently. Still people like it for some reason. They've gotten so used to it over the years.
Not what I said, but that is becoming the reality right now anyway.
>tab auto-complete actually puts in names of products
>caT FOOD? PRESS TAB AGAIN TO SHOP!
A strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
What if OP wasn't a faggot?
This thread reminds me of the FidoNews issue I read once on TextFiles.com, where they complained about ANSI and how it makes your computer slow and shit and you shouldn't ever use that trash.
>yfw ANSI is the JavaScript and Flash of then...Or they're the ANSI of today...
Either way, the more things change the more they stay the same.
That's not TOO bad. It's not so far from how graphs used to be rendered at the command line.
I love it. Tempted to do my bullshit work powerpoints as this kind of graphic and then just "curl" them to a full screen terminal session.
>What kind of form would computing have taken
Direct cranial interface.
Have you not read Neuromancer?? It is not exactly new.
The ARM SOCs would actually be useful.
What if Linux had a proper framebuffer that was direct to hardware that had a decent API that you could build graphical apps from that didn't require X or the even shittier Wayland...?
I started to wonder how internet would look. Let's assume WWW still gets invented in this text-only world.
Remember the old DOS TUIs? Websites would look like them, using rudimentary CSS-style language to specify colors. There'd be 2 or 3 border styles, maybe more but not all platforms could display them. There could be even hover styles for buttons and links, if mouse is available.
Instead of "best viewed in 1024x768 resolution", some sites would say "best viewed in 120x50" meaning you'd have to increase the number of columns and rows first.
A major argument would be whether websites are allowed to redefine the display palette (usually 16 colors) for custom colors. Some want to reprogram the character generator to display primitive graphics, but only few browsers on selected platforms support this, so it's not a good feature to rely on. The new experimental YouTube video service uses custom characters and colors to display surprisingly high-quality streaming video (no sound yet, though), but it takes more CPU time and bandwidth than most have, so it remains a technical curiosity.
And there'd be purists who insist only viewing white text on black (or vice versa) and they turn off all styles. They'd complain about "modern and bloated" web browsers taking more than 50 kilobytes of precious disk space.
You are literally talking about the BBS era when it introduced ANSI then later embedded vector graphics.
>The new experimental YouTube video service uses custom characters and colors
No.
There is no possible technical reason something can draw fonts but not single pixel on a pixel display.
> Two FBI agents i front of a corpse
> Mulder: i think he has somthing in his poket
> Mulder extracts a broken piece of plastic
>Scully: could be some type of radio - procedes to press the right button
> Muller looks like a mouse made of plastic, what an idiot
> Scully Inded
RIP Steve jobs 1955-1965
Likely the issue would be software, or hardware related.
But really it's likely that there wont be a "youtube," at least not as we know it today. It would be unlikely, after it being so entrenched that it is only with text that a computer is used, that hardware wouldn't allow for it.
I'm talking "why do we need more than 50MHz?" limitations.
>Likely the issue would be software, or hardware related.
No, it wouldn't.
Yes it would. In this hypothetical reality the type of hardware that would be widespread would be so far below what we have now that the capability for video would likely be out of reach.
Their idea of having "plenty of storage space" would probably be something around 500MB.
Assuming no graphical interface at all? Computers would probably still be only used in govt. university and business. Mainstream consumer support would never take off.
post some neat terminal applications for replacing gui ones
www.jaredandcoralee.com/CLIapps.html
They probably would still be in the home, just only hobbyists would have them.
Most people who rushed out to purchase them in the 80s, would have grown tired of them after news broke that 5Mhz is as fast as processors will ever get.
thanks user, just what I was looking for.
lynx, links, w3m, emacs (nox), mutt, dvtm, ffmpeg
YES. This is my wet dream to fix computing. Remove consumers.
Yay, back to $10,000 computers. what a joy.
If we assume that it stagnated at 5MHz level specifications by now they probably would have perfected it to the point that a computer is very cheap (look at the price of the ARM SOCs for one example), it's just that most people wont be all that interested in them considering their very limited capabilities.
In fact, his utopia would likely go the other way and end up being in a massive cultural stagnation. Pretty much everything would have been written, and probably in rock-solid, near-errorless assembly at that. I think this is almost worse, imagine using a file manager whose last update was 15 years ago, whose company is out of business because it's hard to sell something that everyone already has, and with no room for expansion, very little else to advertise a release with.
Probably same with operating systems as well. A total full-stop in an entire industry.