Ask HN: What have we lost in tech and society?
Happy Friday, HN.
I’m curious, what software features have we lost over time?
In game software, most kids don’t play split screen anymore. It’s a sort of dated concept that I’d like to see come back. It used to be that you could go over to a friends house and play games together as a result of this feature.
What else have we lost in other industries, software, or hardware?
32 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 89.7 ms ] threadTouched on above: open systems that allowed modding like Jedi Knight 2 MP, or custom content, like Warcraft 3 custom maps, which did not survive the transition to a meaner, newer Blizzard corporation.
Also lost, I think, is charm in interfaces/the medium. As it's less and less remarkable that game UIs exist, there is increasing emphasis on getting them out of the way. Cute skeumorphic designs are not so common now.
On that same note, quirks. Age of Mythology included a miniature encyclopedia for every unit in the game, including for chickens. I read this a lot, as I had time and not a lot going on.
Remembering how many different themes and things were made for Gnome 1 and 2 it's depressing to see that almost completely gone from modern Linux DEs.
I'd usually use it for a while and get bored. I remember you could do some pretty extensive mods, but it would definitely risk breaking things, or getting a virus.
It all seemed really promising, but kind of petered out.
I booted up some old-ish laptops so the kids could use them, and they were grinding to a halt on windows 10
I get the options are chromeos or linux - but makes me think how much hardware waste is there when people replace windows laptops due to this
Even if so, sounds like a problem with no hardware graphics acceleration to my untrained ear
Unfortunately running a browser, outlook, and teams was enough to cause really annoying hickups. I didn't even realize it was my laptop, because I was remoted in somewhere.
I'm more than a little salty that an 8GB PC can no longer run a pretty basic suite of work apps, simultaneously. I guess all three of them have assumed that they will have gobs of memory to themselves.
A hand-me-down Windows laptop feels like a major setback, but Macbooks are decently fast after years (if the keyboard didn't fail).
Software features we've lost:
(1) Shareware
(2) Buying software as a physical experience: the box, the manual, the map, the 'keyboard overlay', the retail display, the retail shop, visiting with friends to see what's new.
(3) Concise, locally available documentation (eg. man pages/CHM).
(4) General software efficiency.
Losses in related areas:
(1) Common hardware platforms.
(2) Upgradeable/maintainable hardware.
(3) Areas of the house dedicated for computing.
(4) Reading. People are not reading so much as before. This impacts negatively areas such as language development, vocabulary, grammatical complexity, and capacity for communicating and reasoning in structured/non-narrative formats.
(5) English as a native language with native language comprehension, vocabulary and grammar levels. English is now a second (or third) to most of its speakers affects the depth and breadth of complexity that it is possible to utilize with most audiences.
(6) General shift to short attention span, meme/viral optimized, consumption-oriented, online media experiences (Smart TVs, tiktok, youtube shorts, twitter, etc.) encouraging emotional/reactive/consumption experience rather than a wondrous/creative/concentrated/more well rounded experience of technology.
Socrates claims that there is a forgetfulness that comes with writing [1]. I guess that changing from passing history through oral stories to passing history through writing certainly means that some oral skills will be lost. I guess every technology, even writing, comes with its own set of tradeoffs
[1] https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
We've lost the ability to just copy and run programs. The "portable software" movement is a step back in that direction.
We've lost the ability to have our own systems that others could access with a phone call, and instead now have internet "access" that actively prevents that type of use.
We lost the local communities that would form on these small shared systems, and the innovation that spawned from them.
We've lost the ability to get used to a program and just have it work for decades without incident. There are people who still would rather be using WordPerfect for MS-DOS.
We've lost hardware simple enough to comprehend, modify, repair, and trust. There's no single OS in charge of your PC, there are firmware systems under the OS taking care of things in the chipset, the SSDs and other interfaces.
We've lost the knowledge that no matter what, the next computer or OS would at least run things at the same speed, if not much faster.
We've lost 80x25 characters as a standard screen size, and the simplicity of a common text based interface that reliably acted the same on all compatible computers.
We lost manuals that actually told you all you needed to know. We also lost software stable enough in user interface that the book was still useful later.
Not all the losses were bad
We lost toggle switch or hex keypad boot code that had to be typed in manual. -- Yay!
We lost cassette tape based data and program storage. -- Yay!
We lost hardware that failed often enough you'd learn how to fix it. -- Yay!
Systems that work well offline as well as online.
Web browsers that don't consume all available resources (assuming they ever existed in the first place?)
Software (and games) that you can purchase once and keep using.
Software (including apps, games, and system software) that doesn't pester you constantly with annoying notifications and advertisements.
Apps and web sites without intrusive tracking technology.
A web that is usable without ad blockers.
Software and systems that can be relatively easily understood and modified by end users. (Consider apps and games in BASIC in the 1980s, or early web sites/JavaScript from the 1990s.)
Instantaneous boot into a programming language environment (e.g. BASIC in ROM.)
Corollary: Vendors encouraging end user programming.
Systems that can be fully understood by a single person.
Corollary: the ability of a single developer to create a system that competes with popular commercial offerings.
The prevalence and popularity of the non-commercial internet and web (arguably it's more popular than it ever was but a much smaller and less visible part of the pie.)
Games (and other software) that work reasonably well as originally shipped without a massive patch download on day 1.
Games that start instantly after plugging in a cartridge, without lengthy installation, patch downloads, firmware updates, etc.. (Switch is close but still has updates and day 1 patches.)
Instruction manuals (technically Apple still provides online PDFs which are pretty good.) Printed game guides.
Decent Apple developer documentation.
User group software collections.
Print magazines for software, hardware/electronics, and gaming enthusiasts.
I started to wonder if there would be any noticeable power savings to be gained from this on modern laptops, but then realized I had invented frequency scaling.
The war on general purpose computing has been quite effective.
Everything has ended up like on a phone, where you have dozens of apps that barely interoperate, you are running app A, or you switch to app B, but you can't really compose them.
The idea of using app X to write some files... but then app Y to store or compress them, app Z to search them, etc like good old fashioned UNIX pipelines, shell scripts, or macros has died, and people no longer think that way. Instead, they store their data "inside" the app or the cloud... so they need the app to search, backup, export, restore, etc... and if the app doesn't do that, there is no hope of operating on the same data with other software.
This is why an iPad is not a laptop replacement.
It blows my mind that the current generation of students doesn't quite grasp the concept of files. I don't quite grasp how you can do serious work without operating on files.
Turns out all the changes were auto saving into the original sheet also.
I miss having a distinction between standalone apps and web apps.
It's a ridiculous world and people are buying into it. Some days, I think I'm just retiring into the woods...
Modern computing feels so... nonconsensual.
Everything coerces you into creating an account, installing an app, allowing notifications, etc. And when did "no" become "not now"?
The Google Search bar on my Pixel's home screen no longer opens YouTube links in Firefox, but instead redirects me to the Play Store to install the YouTube app.
Reddit won't show me certain subreddits on the mobile website. They're only available in the app.
Twitter won't let me see tweets without signing in. Instagram prompts me to create an account as soon as I scroll.
There's a lot more. I need a host of browser extensions just to make the harassment bearable.
You may enjoy i.reddit.com, which has the advantage that I'm pretty sure they've forgotten they run it and so it never gets updates.
I miss when "never gets updates" was a bad thing, but here we are.
Yep, the language that tech companies use is so slimy and dystopian it hurts. Most other companies don't pretend to be your friend and guardian who knows what's best for you better than you know yourself. The tone of many tech companies (starting with Google) in their communication to end users is patronising and frankly offensive.