What technical decision made early in the history of some technical system (or by a previous system that inspired later systems) led us down the wrong path?
@urusan Making websites interactive. Also, using HTTP for everything while ignoring other perfectly valid communication protocols. Forgetting that other hardware architectures are possible besides x86. Most modern high level languages. Tech illiteracy.
+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@josemanuel @urusan i hate the everything-over-http idea with a passion. thanks consumer NAT and shitty firewalls!
websites being a sandboxed vm with (relatively) secure application delivery is great, but it really should have been something sane instead.
we do have plenty of architectures now though, only that most cool architectures are used for cable modems or game consoles
@bonifartius
> we do have plenty of architectures now though, only that most cool architectures are used for cable modems or game consoles
I mentioned that in the context of there being plenty of different home computers until the mid 90s (ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore64, MSX, Amiga...). I loved the fact that people were encouraged to find out how their computer actually worked. Those days were fun.
Now everything is gadgets and black boxes. How many people can write assembly today?
There's something sinister about trying to fit everything into a client/server model or to abstract away details through the use of ever higher level languages.
> I mentioned that in the context of there being plenty of different home computers until the mid 90s (ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore64, MSX, Amiga…). I loved the fact that people were encouraged to find out how their computer actually worked. Those days were fun.
yeah, i think if things weren't so barebones with x86 back in the 90s i'd never would have the understamdyof computers i now have.
> Now everything is gadgets and black boxes. How many people can write assembly today?
it's more a problem of the software than of the hardware though. imagine consoles and other things wouldn't have locked down bootloaders but were readily flashable. that would help massively already - even if it wasn't as simple as previous systems.
> There’s something sinister about trying to fit everything into a client/server model or to abstract away details through the use of ever higher level languages.
we are still stuck with this client/server architecture because of NAT. it would be nice if things were more plan9 ish with composable servers. that way you could do so many cool things with your devices. like mounting your music from your homeserver to a powerful server which transcodes it on the fly and that is used by your mobile phone.
we are living in a webshit world though, so the best we'll get is p hooking up venti to pleroma n stuff ;)
@urusan
