'We throw away so much history in our field, acres of dumpsters filled with old manuals and disks. Why are we so cavalier about computing history?'
; you might even walk a battlefield. But you can’t understand software from screenshots any more than you can understand music from album reviews, or baseball from box scores, or Rome from watching gladiator movies, much as you might enjoy gladiator movies. When you boot up a virtual version of, you share in the lived experiences of millions of ancient humans. You can see how they spent their paltry CPU budget to fill their low--resolution screens.
You learn their priorities. They started batch processing, running programs as lumps of code, but as soon as CPUs allowed, they made them interactive, alive. Even if those were just green numbers on a screen, à la VisiCalc. As soon as they could, early users went post--textual, pictographic—pointing at things with the mouse, Spartan virtue abandoned for Athenian excess.
a field-programmable gate array—shape-shifter circuitry that takes on characteristics of other devices. It’s purely for simulation of retro machines, including the Commodores Amiga and 64, Atari STs, 486s, and various gaming platforms, which for most people are the main event . The box is called the MiSTer. It’s not a consumer product but rather a folk--created reference platform: If you buy these parts and assemble them, then download some free software and plug in an HDMI card, it becomes an old machine. For this privilege one pays around $600. It gives me the same joy I imagine people who are into expensive headphones or collect vintage vinyl feel—that sense of something being.
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