Rose

#include <memes/wow_this_is_literally_useless.txt>

If it had happened now, that figure might be accurate. However, this was originally exploited in 2022, so it’s probably pretty bad.

“The new Windows Terminal is so slick! And PowerShell is soooo awesome! When will Linux get cool neat powerful stuff like this?”

“Uh… About three decades ago?”

(To be honest, PowerShell is neat. But it’s also cross platform, so if I really want it on Linux I guess I can get it there too? I don’t really need to, I’m in middle of rewriting some PowerShell stuff in Python)

Turtles are great computer science animals. They do graphics, and have shell access.

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In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.

I guess I was lucky. My parents got me my first Commodore 64 C second hand, and it included the floppy drive. Guess it was affordable that way.

I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.

Ooh, I didn’t have one of those fancy pieces of gear! I lived in a small town. Used to see disk notchers at the book/stationery store, which had the reputation of being slightly pricy place but was the only store in town that had computer stuff at the time.

Instead, I figured out a way to cleanly cut the notch using scissors. Two horizontal cuts, then two cross cuts, then carefully cut out the remainder.

Of course it evolved into a crab.

It was either that, or… something else I guess

The tape drive has a hole on the top for adjusting the azimuth, but one of my friends basically just removed the top cover entirely for easier access to the screw. I did that too for some particularly tricky tapes.

Another of my friends had basically an unearthly knack of adjusting this stuff. Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work. Which makes no sense.

This was all a kind of mysterious part of the Commodore 64 culture to me. Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.

“How do I rotate this PDF? I need to print it.”

“Uh, you can just set it to print in landscape mode.”

(Scornful stare, for using space age words) “NO! I must ROTATE the PDF!”

I’m sure I had a conversation like this with one of the acquaintances of my dad

Short summary: Elon gives Elon some Elon and congratulates Elon for being such an Elon, that big money boy he is. Money!

“The samurai charged into battle, shouting You must install Adobe Flash plugin to view this content.”

I want 1990s Internet back. Except for background MIDIs, which should be banned elsewhere but which should be made legally mandatory on music-related pages. Forcing record companies to share literal performance instructions for their music would annoy them gloriously.

Flash was a solution for a real problem that web creators were having at the time. Unfortunately, it was a stopgap solution that ended up being incredibly popular and nobody was concerned about building a smooth transition to a standardised way of doing things.

In the 1990s the web browsers didn’t really have any real interactive multimedia capabilities. Browser makers said “eh, that’s the plugin makers’ responsibility”, and so someone made a plugin all right, and the creators said “eh, that’s good enough”.

In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to say that browser makers and the web standards folks should have just gone for the sort of stuff we now have in HTML5. But that’s because we nowadays see the standards as a good thing. This was taking place in the late 1990s, and the browser makers, Macromedia and the creators were not really all that concerned about standardisation and interoperability. Which, of course, ended up hurting everyone when it all collapsed on its own.

Things might have been different if Adobe had actually turned Flash into a genuine open format (like PDF, which is still very much a living and useful format despite the fact that you shouldn’t touch Adobe’s own PDF software with a ten foot pole) and it had become part of the landscape of web standards, but that’s for the alternate history buffs to debate.