1/ A #Sunday morning thread on #vintageComputing, computers as #programmable, #nostalgia, and #floppydisks .

In her delightful forward to "Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium," Lori Emerson describes people visiting he Media Archaeology Lab. She describes the delight - even for people too young to possibly have nostalgia for using floppies - of using those computers and disks.

2/ Lori recalls "that time period, sometime between the 1970s and the 1990s, when we had a sense about how our computers worked... when we knew where our data lived and we also knew who (not what) we were sharing our data with." She says, "these young people walk out of the lab seemingly buoyed with both longing for a world they never lived in and hope for a future world that is unlike the on ethey're in right now."

3/ She continues, "They don't need to hear a lecture... about the trajectory of computing to immediately understand that the current paired practices of blackboxing devices and making them functionally obsolete within just a few years of their making is destroying the planet and its inhabitants... Floppy disks and old computing are not the answers to our problems -- but they are... vehicles to rethink what's pragmatically and philosophically possible."

4/ Let's sit with these thoughts a minute. Aren't we living in an era where there is an effort to stamp out the notion of a general-purpose programmable #computer? Apple would love us to believe that the iPad - filled with hardware every bit capable of being a general-purpose computer - is a device for consumption, one which runs apps written by others, one which actively thwarts efforts to program on it. The home PCs of the 80s were programmable in a way the iPad isn't.

@jgoerzen this is the opposite of what Apple wants us to believe about the iPad. Also, the existence of Swift Playgrounds (which these days can be used to build a full app and even upload it to the App Store, all on the iPad with no Mac involved) completely derails your entire argument: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift-playgrounds/id1496833156?mt=12

@rothomp3 You mean an app that forces programmers into a language written by that company, and forces them into a deliberately-limited API? On a platform that has a history of banning things like Z-code interpreters, game emulators, or other things that can "execute arbitrary code"?

I don't think that derails my argument at all.

@jgoerzen the completely open source language? And the API is no more limited than it is in Xcode. You’re even free to write all those other things, you just can’t upload them to the App Store. And as for executing arbitrary code, you might want to look at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ish-shell/id1436902243 which has been in the App Store for a good while now.