What do you miss about computers from 17+ years ago?

What do you miss about computers from 17+ years ago?

17+ years ago I was young enough to still have hope.

Ur mom

Nothing. Everything was shit back then.

Hard drives without wacky power saving features that wore them down quicker than expected.

Enough features to be useful and unobtrusive at the same time.
A design ideology that stresses the fact that it is a tool, not a advertising/media consumption platform.

Developers actually had to optimize their games and couldn't assume everyone had over 9000GB of RAM, infinite amount of storage and bandwidth.

The games also had to actually fucking work before they started selling them.

...

I think the desktop UI was nearly perfected at that point (would take a couple more years for OS X)
minimal amount of clicks for maximum amount of work.

hardware-wise, and internet-speed-wise, there's a lot left to be desired

there was also more variety of software. download.com was full of it. freeware, shareware, payware. you could try it all and find what you like. now, natural selection trimmed things to just a few select programs (usually open-source, or big corporation). some have been perfected, but some are worse.

code was also not so ridiculously bloated as it is now. 20 GB for your OS? that's how big hard drives were then...

the PC market was trimming down at that point. less vendors (HP buys compaq, gateway buys emachines, seagate buys conner, maxtor buys quantum, etc). in the 80s you could see 50 or more different vendors for 386's. now you just have a few big OEMs, and the occasional parts for enthusiasts to put together.

being crowded means lots of new ideas and lots of competition.

that was not just true of games

OSes and other programs were resource-efficient simply because RAM and CPU power was limited.

nowadays, all those CPU cycles are squandered on muh transparency, or sparkling confetti effects

aesthetics
i've got a win95 theme for win7 but it's not the same.

>Someone making a valid statement abouit computers 17 years ago
>Mentions a game
>lololollololo go back to Sup Forums teehee

Gold plated connector pins.

Software being finished before it was released, rather than shoved into production once the scrum deliverable is "good enough" with rolling patches that never fucking achieve feature completeness. Fuck agile, fuck rolling releases, and fuck "good enough" when your featureset isn't what you fucking advertised. I don't care that waterfall development is slower, I prefer that process solely because it delivers a finished product every time.

I miss when programs were small and self contained in a single exe with no registry integration or dependencies. Nowadays every program is bloated and relies on a dozen shitty Microsoft dll files that have to been installed.

>waterfall
more like V, because they constantly checked off the software was meeting requirements.

Most of those icons are still around in Windows 7 and you can use them, not sure about 10 since i don't use that

>C:\Windows\System32\moricons.exe
They're still there.

Try Chicago95 on Xubuntu

>off
fucking autocorrect inserted that

Other than no real social media normalfag shit?

Nothing.

>Compact GUI design elements that took up a small amount of screen real estate.

>A slight learning curve that kept the total idiots out but allowed anyone in who was interested in how computers worked

>Non-meme programming languages

Delet this

I miss Windows 2000, Quake 2 Rocket Arena servers, oldschool Linux, Napster, Action Quake 2, EverQuest, the first time you went from dial-up to cable internet or DSL, etc.

...

...

Aesthetics and focus on functionality.

The less-ness of it.

You could understand a decent part of your computer, maybe 10% of it. These days, you're lucky to understand even 1%.

This.

Also, nowadays everything's gotta be connected to the internet so it can mine your data.

>These days, you're lucky to understand even 1%.
And that explains the postings here on Sup Forums.