I love, love, love flipping through old magazines. Look, an ad for a commercial Emacs! A C compiler for just $495! A port of vi to MS-DOS for $149! A sort command for just $135! A PC card with a 68000 coprocessor for heaven knows why!
The good old days were fun for their sense of everything-is-new adventure, but there's an awful lot I don't miss.
"Borland introduces Turbo Prolog, the natural language of Artificial Intelligence" just $99.95!
You don't miss being able to make a living from writing your own software?
That part sounds pretty wonderful, but it also means you were paying through the teeth for everyone else’s software, too.
There are still plenty of small shops making a nice software living today. I don’t have the nerve to do it myself, though.
No one ever talks about how OSS literally devalued software, which resulted in the best hackers being forced to take corporate jobs.
If you listen to RMS’ talks, arguably this is a feature, not a bug.
Most people pick up on the idea of freedom as in liberty with OSS: that you should be able to amend software at will. Strangely there are limits in his mind (at one talk I attended he insisted he didn’t care about being able to amend the software in his microwave, so didn’t care if it was Free or not).
However when asked about how programmers should make a living, his economic argument is that we should be paid for our hours, not for our software. In his telling, the right economic model is not the author who writes something once and is paid forever by everyone who wants to consume that “art”, but more like the trading crafter who makes and sells things on an on-going basis.
In support of that model, the “devaluation” of software, has meant we have a planet running on it that would not have been possible if every library and application on ever machine had cost $100-$500 each. The advances in scientific and medical research powered by that software driven World would not have been achieved yet, but neither would the damage caused by social media and adtech.
I’m not sure which side of the fence I sit on. I’ve had a good career being paid to write software because of its growing influence in the World, which likely would have stalled if OSS didn’t exist. But sure, I like the idea of spending a year writing something and living the rest of my life off the proceeds, like most people would.
Note that the vast majority of authors also don't write something once and is paid forever sufficiently to life of it. The average full-time author in the UK would've made more at McDonalds, and usually only earn that much because they continue to churn out works.
Like with software, this is in large part because everyone can write, and so there is a glut of content, and while a lot of it is poorly written tripe, there's a glut of quality content in almost every niche that is good enough that outstrips the demand, and so only the tiniest proportion of authors earns well. Like with software, a lot of people also do it because they want to, rather than for the money, which further drives down the prices.
I've published two novels. They've sold substantially better than average but nowhere near bestseller level. And yet, despite selling substantially better than average, they're the lowest paid work I've done in more than two decades. I'm a fast writer - the second novel took me 3 weeks. It's still never going to pay for itself. That's okay.
If I wanted to earn a living from writing, I'd look to write articles or columns for magazines and newspapers, or doing copywriting, paid by the word, rather than writing novels.
The return to 90's style licenses kind of makes the point of everyone realizing someone has to put into the money, capitalism doesn't work with pull requests to upstream.
Libre licenses boosted computing like no else. The 90's was mostly about turds in golden cases.
90% of everything is crap (Sturgeon's law), but as I understand both commercial and free software advanced quite a bit in the 1990s: Visual BASIC, HyperCard 2.0, Java, JavaScript, Linux, MacOS System 7-9, TrueType, Windows 95, Windows NT, Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Encarta, Lotus Notes 2.0, MPEG, QuickTime, video editing (Video Toaster etc.), Pro Tools, MP3 encoders/players and WinAmp, Acrobat and PDF software, WWW, Apache, NCSA Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, FrontPage (and other html editors), ICQ and Instant Messenger, video conferencing (CU-SeeMe), various IDEs (Eclipse), etc. Not to mention incredible developments in PC, console and arcade games...
Ehhh... I disagree.
Java -> Bloated compared to Icon/TCL
VB -> OKish, but TCL/Tk and a bit of C did wonders under Unix.
NT -> Good, advanced
95 -> Mediocre against Amiga/Mac.
MSO -> Polished turd and uberused, giving disasters such as the renaming on Genomics and tons of papers now being void.
MPEG -> Good, bound to TV and multimedia standards.
QT -> Propietary crap, but QT3D was and it's still interesting. Lqtplay from libquicktime plays them well.
MP3 -> Opus and OGG preferred here
Acrobat/PDF -> PostScript and DJVU
Netscape/FrontPage -> Damn crazy bloat with opaque formats on tons of stuff not bound to proper terminology. Even using Emacs editing HTML pages seems easier. Composer looked easier than FP, for sure.
Videoconf -> Yes, h323 and friends.
IDE's -> A lot of them were better under DOS or very bloated under Windows, such as Eclipse, Netbeans...
PC/Console -> Yep, 3DFX/Glide and free Unixen, but consoles went downhill, the PC was set ahead since the Unreal engine.
I disagree, if it was such a great thing for software creators, we wouldn't be seeing everyone going back to similar licenses in spirit.
Alternatively, placing software behind API paying walls.
>Placing software behind paid API's...
- Hello, MSN network.
- Hello, closed memory-dump formats for Microsoft Office.
- You don't play this niche audio/video format? Install this new adware player, and now you will. Oh, enjoy this new adware toolbar.
- Shareware/nagware. Enough said.
- Software patents and codecs. MP3 encoder for streaming? Pay. MPEG encoder/decoder for a custom A/V project? Pay. And so on.
I subscribe to Microcenter's emails and the one with the miscellaneous lesser priced accessories always completely loads in Gmail and it gives me a little bit of that feeling of flipping through an old computer shopper. I think those are all being scanned too and uploaded to the archive I think https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-may-1996-images...
For the young'uns among us, imaging that you didn't have access to the Internet, but you still needed to research and build a PC from parts. Now imagine someone mails you a 896 page (!!!) magazine describing basically every part you could ever actually need or want, along with a gazillion vendors for each.
And you got a new version every month.
It was pure magic, I tell you.
It was wonderful. It's like having the entire industry in your hands. If it's for sale, chances are Computer Shopper has it.
The magazine was nearly 100% ads and I could spend a long time doing nothing but consuming ads. Nonetheless, I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
Indeed. The ads were the point of Computer Shopper. The reason it worked so well is the advertisers knew their most aggressive price competitors would also have ads, so it would be pointless to advertise unless you knew you could compete. While companies always prefer to avoid such side-by-side comparisons, the number of readers of Computer Shopper was simply too large to resist for many.
> I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
How else are they going to force you to view advertisements for things that you are completely uninterested in and which are completely unrelated to the page you are viewing?
Which is why the industry is such a clusterfuck, forcing ad spam on people who aren't interested in it.
If you buy a paper magazine you're already interested in the ads. Doesn't matter if it's pet supplies, model railways, computers, or fashion. You've predefined yourself as a potential consumer and you're going to see the ads as a service, not an intrusion. And if they're all in one place, you can comparison shop.
Facebook and Google are going to sell you ads based on your web searches. Mostly they do a terrible job of guessing what you're really interested in. Sometimes the results are so bad they're hilarious.
So instead of providing a useful service, the ads exist to perpetuate the system that generates them, prioritising vapid metrics like "engagement" - which really just measures distraction and wasted time.