What is on Your Mind?

One more "on my mind" question ('cause it's constantly on my mind): does modern technology style make you sad and wishing PCs were like they used to be in 90's? I mean we had awesome UIs like motif, win3.1, warp3/4, cde, etc... HDDs used to load with sound. Web used to be a text on a white background with some pictures and files to download + FTP servers... And now it's just facebook, web2.0 (or maybe 3.0, who knows...), tonns and tonns of javascript, +1s, 95% of web-sites made with CMSes, windows8 (*shivers*), kde4, gnome3 (*shivers*), google chrome os (*pukes*). And nobody wants old style, when computers were normal. The sky was blue. Maybe I'm just getting old? But I'm just 24. Can you believe that?

I do think people have been somewhat conned into giving up a lot of functionality for the appearance of convenience, and often forgotten why computers were invented in the first place.

It used to be, you got a computer because you had a job in mind for it. Now they're mostly used as multipurpose communication devices; more people are using them than ever before, and don't really care to understand how they work beyond the cargo-cult level. Should they happen to need a computer to do computation, they have no idea the thing they're sitting at can actually do. I've seen people picking through hundreds of megabytes of spreadsheets, by hand, to mine the data they want. For crying out loud, that's what they invented punchcard tabulators for a century ago, their computer's very most distant ancestor.

I dont quite see the downside of websites made with CMSes, considering the fiendish hideousness that we had to cope with before we had them. However, often times, the next release hailed as the next best thing, rarely is. I truly wonder what level of user testing has gone into many of the products that we deal with on a daily basis and I conclude that UX is just a dirty word to the budget sponsor. After such release, we try to hold out as long as possible before upgrading becomes a necessity.

That is why I am still holding unto a 5 1/4 floppy disk I found in my father's cabinet among his old records (the ones that play on a gramophone)

I think going back to 90's interfaces would quickly get old.

When i saw new storage system interface programmed in Flash, it gave me a headache
Flash FFS.

But it does work fine, for now

Now it's all about impressing the management with good looks, dimming out screens and shit.

Seems to me that people are becoming more and more slaves to bad applications and solutions, instead of those apps helping people in their everyday jobs.

Like Corona I feel saddened by peoples failure to understand what their machine can do now that computers have become standard consumer devices. However there is hope that kids today will learn the fundamentals with the advent of the Raspberry Pi and MIT's Scratch for young kids. I'm currently <strike>messing with scratch</strike> teaching a kid how to program in scratch, and it reminds me of the ZX80 days, though with a pointy clicky GUI and online storage rather than a flimsy keyboard and a cassette tape (remember them?) . This gives me some hope for the future.