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The more I read about Linux consoles, the more I think, did I miss out?
Just discovered finger, late to the party, for others, it gets you info on everyone else logged into a machine.
That we used to cohabitate on a "mainframe", share resources and even be social on these machines, is mind blowing to me.
How in the everloving fuck did we go from that, to the garbage that is the Internet today? I feel like we have been walking backwards since the late 80's.
Did Microsoft do this? I was spoonfed a story on how you needed Microsoft to run a company. Uhm, *nix had fileshare, chat, status info, mail, spreadsheets, text writer and VCS 30+ years ago...
3 days ago · 👍 chirale, klimperfix, drh3xx, half_elf_monk
@half_elf_monk They definitely weren't. While social media sites are definition wise, kind of that, I think the resource sharing and collaboration part is sorely missing.
Plus you also rarely know who you are connected to and with, it's not really a community, but more of a landfill. · 2 minutes ago
In defense of cloud storage, there's a lot to be said for redundancy and automated backups. Even if you carry a pocket data storage measured in TBs, it's still nice to know that you could get mugged/cosmic-ray'd and still not lose all your data. · 3 minutes ago
@half_elf_monk I honestly think a TUI could do the same even for the masses. Problem often being, like with irssi, that you need to read a thick ass manual and even then, it's hard to know where you are in the interface.
Wordgrinder and tmux for example have super easy to remember commands, very few of them and use layering instead, with a "status" bar.
So maybe we just need to update the TUI or some of these older things? · 4 minutes ago
Technically, doesn't using facebook count as "sharing resources and being social on a mainframe"? Users don't have many useful permissions there, but it is a huge self-contained social mainframe. I don't know much about how bboards worked back in the day, but I don't think they were federated or decentralized or distributed or anything. · 6 minutes ago
how? Clippy did it. That stupid paperclip from Microsoft as a representation of Clip-Art, more user-friendly graphics, and a giant amount of advertising dollars spent on selling convenience, rather than long term solutions. Admittedly, this was inevitable for the non-technical users. What happened was the mass adoption by non-techie types, who needed a lot more gui. That market is bigger, and gets a lot more catering. · 9 minutes ago
I feel the same way sometimes. I wish there were better guides for how to use some of these great terminal/shell programs like finger/talk/tty/etc. I've done IRC through gui clients, but irssi was intimidating so I gave up. · 11 minutes ago
@lucifer_jehovah_smith Just looked up talk, it seems to still be maintained and even standard on some distro's. 😂
pinky is also default in most distro's, so lots of stuff alive and kicking.
I know I've also seen some shell/bash communities here on gemini, so maybe it's time to explore. 😂 · 1 day ago
There was also the "talk" program. Used to use that for chatting up my girlfriend in the early 2000s when she was working as a secretary in the university CS department. Sometimes on ISPs back in the 90s if you had a shell account, some rando might send you a talk request and you could have an interesting conversation. · 1 day ago
Yeah and back in the day, there were even services that ran on finger. Like, IIRC one of them would give status of vending machines. Look up old copies of Yanov's List of Internet Services from the mid 90s. Also oodles of stuff you could do with just an email account. · 1 day ago
@chirale I think for profit conglomerates is to blame for a lot of the reasons email is a mess today. A lot of the solutions to problems, seems to be focused on keeping things afloat and chugging along with the status quo. · 2 days ago
There are nuances. Trying to keep a mail server today is hell because of spam and phishing, so you've got to rely on someone bigger. However, this evolution into for-profit conglomerates wasn't natural: even Tim Berners Lee was "suggested" to use a public domain license for his web browser instead of the GNU GPL he wanted to use because of companies. · 2 days ago
@darkghost ❤️ · 2 days ago
There's an old saying. "What hardware giveth, software taketh away." · 3 days ago
@darkghost I think the "mainframe" idea, has always had a lot of potential, especially if we are talking social aspects and collaborative efforts. It's part of why I also don't understand the need to keep making PC's more powerful.
We are at the point where my laptop is more powerful than 5 over clocked Core2Duo's. I however am not even capable of using half of that power for anything. I feel a lot of these resources are wasted for the same reason on idiotic things.
There is really no need to have games that are 100GB+, browsers that are 6GB installs or hell, browsers that need 3D acceleration. · 3 days ago
Now what is silly is the modern internet. Mainframes charged per minute to access the vast resources available only to major institutions. We have achieved the personal computer. We have unfathomable resources by 1980s standards at our fingertips. And what do we do? We're doing cloud computing. We use the vast resources to do basic tasks on someone else's computer for a price. And someone else's computer is only marginally more powerful than what's sitting on your desk. You're paying for convenience. It's gone from the only way to access a computer to "oh, well I can't be bothered to bring a pocket sized mass storage device with me." · 3 days ago
@hansbrix This is a direct result of the personal computer revolution. These collaborative resources existed because it was so darn expensive to own your own machine. Even the idea of personal Unix in the 1980s was pretty prohibitive because it needed a lot of resources next to a dumbed down DOS. Microsoft had their own UNIX and it was called Xenix, which eventually spun off into the SCO group and sued deep-pocketed Linux developers like IBM. That's another story. The Tandy Model 16B ran Xenix and cost an eye-watering equivalent of €18,000 in 1984. The marketing said it supported up to 3 users, one on the system and 2 dumb terminals (sold separately.) · 3 days ago