That BBS link is possibly going to eat a zillion hours of your life. Fair warning.
- Programming in 1987 Versus Today. (via)
- late 1980s Czech video games. (via)
- The Best Comics of 2021.
- Cursed. It gets worse the longer you look at it.
- Haiku Contract Report: December 2021. Linked cause I am unsure if X11 compatibility is good or bad for an ecosystem.
- World’s First Single Chip Apple II Boots. (via)
- Public libraries are better than Google. Sounds reactionary, but I just realized my last 3 real work conundrums were solved by library books. (via)
- BBSing in the Snow Is the Best Way to Login.
- which led me to the Telnet BBS Guide.
- CathodeTV, like time travel to late night US TV circa 1979. (via)
X11 compatibility means you can port a mind-boggling amount of software with minimal effort. X11 works. It’s not perfect, sure, but it works. We really, really don’t need to reinvent the wheel all the time. And we definitely don’t need to make it square just because round is kinda boring by now. Some things are supposed to be boring.
I know what X11 compatibility gets you; the issue is that it can squeeze out native app development. It keeps your own platform from developing anything unique or better.
This was an early question for BeOS; I think Jean Louis-Gassee talked about it at one point, but I don’t have a link handy to show.
I don’t see many people developing native apps for Haiku. I was hoping to get into it, and never got around to even installing the OS. And I’ve been following its development for a long time now.
Besides, do we really have to keep reinventing the wheel by making new apps for the same tasks on every single operating system out there? Don’t we have anything better to do with our time and energy? Whether we’re talking personal energy or electricity.
Yeah, that’s the trade-off: reinventing the wheel vs having the existing wheels overwhelm new development. On the other hand, you could argue everyone should still be using nvi, but it’s the jump to new platforms that brought new editors. For instance.
I mentioned that cause I loved Programmer’s Editor (Pe) on BeOS, and BBEdit on MacOS, and those were very distinct to the operating system they ran on. Heck, vi/emacs are Unixish all the way through.