Steamrollered by PC compatibles obviously. At the time it wasn't clear yet that for 8086/8 you needed register level hardware compatibility, not just BIOS call compatibility (as in the CP/M days) to stay in the market. And nonstandard disk format to boot.
The non-standard floppy format was a huge annoyance for users. While the higher density formats were cool, the hardware could operate on PC-compatible format, but the OS wouldn’t support it.
ROM BIOS compatibility would have been nice, but it could be implemented at the custom MS-DOS version and run from RAM, but I’m not sure there were clean room implementations back at that point.
In general, a good strategy is just staying a little bit behind. Let the new fads play themselves out. Some have staying power. Bitcoin never did turn into a usable currency, just another speculator's toy. Luckily I am - so far - in a position where I can watch the AI thing from the sidelines to see how it plays out.
The way I see it, there is very little creativity in big business. Fund an interesting new concept, or fund a formulaic sequel? Same thing every time.
So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smartphones and think: We must do as they do. And thus S3 suspend gets replaced by "modern suspend" - just like a smartphone, not really suspended, just in a low power, always online, always ready to act mode. And local storage gets replaced by cloud, and local accounts get replaced by cloud accounts, and the cloud reaches in and modifies features and apps. Does this really make sense? Does it matter? Smartphones blazed the way and are successful. Must copy the formula, of your device just being an extension to the cloud, nothing more.
I sit here in front of my old school Linux machine, with terabytes of local storage and as little cloud dependency as possible. Heck it's part of the cloud itself, hosting an ancient cobwebsite right here from the basement. But I feel increasingly like an anachronism. Want to pass a photo dump to computer-neurotypicals? Not even a USB stick will do. Not even a USB-C stick that will plug right into their smartphone and allow the pix to be copied off easily from its UI. The whole concept of non-cloud stuff has become alien to most people.
Don't even get me started about getting photos from them! Anyway if that's how the world works now, why would anyone bother making a traditional operating system any more?
Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean. I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident.
I watched someone getting a livestream of an important (to them) soccer game going via the sort of thing usually reserved for "adult" content - that any given click, be it "play" or "fullscreen" or whatever, has a 9/10 chance of triggering a junk popup rather than the intended action, so you play whack-a-mole until you finally get it playing, whack-a-mole again until you get fullscreen, and then for heaven's sake don't touch it any more. Whereas with the adblocker, typically it looks completely clean, with no junk popups, and every click doing exactly what it should on the first try.
Anyway so could it be that the web having turned into such ad-overloaded garbage, that even its designers have adblockers running and don't even fully realize what a mess they're publishing?
To be fair, I don't think the porn sites have ever had egregious UX/UI. It's mostly Sourceforge and image hosters from the early 00's that have my votes as the worst offenders.
To be fair to your point though, the pirate sports streams are AWFUL in terms of link landmines.
> I don't think the porn sites have ever had egregious UX/UI
Pornsites and pirating websites have always been amongst the most egregious UX/UI designed to make you accidentally click or open ads.
The only way I can explain your differing experience is that you only visit pornhub.com which is indeed the one well behaved beast in a pack of rabid possums.
I do web development, it makes no sense for me to use a browser most of the public doesn't use. Also I have a ton of extensions that help with development. Firefox is painful.
Every time someone complains about firefox it's something trivial like this... "I don't like the default download location." / "I don't like how the dev tools opens on the bottom." / "I don't like the way the tab bar looks." Absolutely wild to me that using a browser without an adblocker, forever, is better than spending a week or whatever getting used to the different dev tools.
> Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff?
I am so convinced that this is the case. They're using their own product using some max-level sub that removes all the annoyances, and don't realise how unbearable the default experience is.
Speaking of the NYT: previously, I used to bypass the paywall, and I simply got the article with no nonsense. Now I subscribe, and every single day I get an obnoxious pop-up ad to upgrade my subscription to some higher family tier. Giving the NYT money has made my day a tiny bit more annoying than not giving them money. Lesson learnt.
My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.
Cameras? I suppose the world still has some weird cameras that need proprietary/weird drivers, but for all intents and purposes: USB cameras are UVC and work with a generic driver, and IP cameras are OnVIF and work with ffmpeg. I can't imagine the latter having any OS dependencies as far as Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows is concerned. Quality is fine - I have a bunch recording 24/7 with high quality audio and video.
Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar.
But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just install Fedora from its bootable live image, and it will work. Secure boot, suspend, Wifi, the special buttons on the keyboard, and so on. But the downside is enormous bloat and yes, often the kind of tinkering you really don't want to do any more, such as the Brother laser printer drivers still being shipped as 32-bit binaries and the installer silently failing because one particular 32-bit dependency wasn't autoinstalled. Or having to get an Ubuntu-dedicated installer (Displaylink!) to run on Fedora.
But here you have the "mainstream" Unix-ish OS absorbing all the bleeding edge stuff, all the bloat. Allowing FreeBSD free reign to be pure, with a higher average quality of user, which sets the tone of the whole scene. An echo of the old days, like Usenet before "Eternal September" and before Canter & Siegel - for those old enough to remember how it all felt back then.
Well, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unixy stuff... vi editor, C toolchain, NFS etc.
I don't know what's the minimum system to run no-GUI mainline Linux on these days. I'm sure BSD has gotten bloated too, but I'll bet not as much.
Brother ship mystery meat linux "drivers" that have a PPD that sends your document through Ghostscript I guess to scrub PostScript that the printer doesn't support.
I tried just using a generic PPD from openprinting.org but that caused the printer to spit out a ream of pages printed with binary junk, so mystery drivers it is.
It still doesn't cease to amaze me what can be done with modern ultra-cheap electronics. $1 for the accelerometer. $17 for four servos. But as DIY cheap weapon development? Only if the ultra-cheap electronics pipeline will keep flowing.
I remember a whole slew of inexpensive netbooks and the like that were technically Windows XP or Windows 7 machines, but came with a dumbed-down "starter" OS, not enough RAM, only a 32-bit CPU in an era were 64 bits were already becoming standard - the sum of which amounted to a barely usable imitation of a real Windows machine and as a result most of these became garage sale fodder pretty quickly.
I thought I was so clever for buying one of those things for like $190 and putting Lubuntu on it to make it usable. It worked - but the joke was still on me when it died a year later.
I used have a netbook as a second personal device around 2013 and loved it. Very easy to carry around and work on the go, and it could do everything except development work (web browsing, Word, Excel). I actually miss the form factor.
reply