[bombcar]

> In retrospect, perhaps the best part about it was that even the biggest systems were sufficiently unsophisticated that a single person could wrap their head around all of the hardware and all of the software.

This was it, even into the 90s you could reasonable "fully understand" what the machine was doing, even with something like Windows 95 and the early internet. That started to fall apart around that time and now there are so many abstraction layers you have to choose what you specialize in.

And the fact that you couldn't just shit another software update into the update server to be slurped up by all your customers meant you had to actually test things - and you could easily explain to the bosses why testing had to be done, and done right, because the failure would cost millions in new disks being shipped around, etc. Now it's entirely expected to ship software that has significant known or unknown bugs because auto-update will fix it later.

[origin_path]

It isn't right to consider that time as a golden age of software reliability. Software wasn't less buggy back then. My clear recollection is that it was all unbelievably buggy by today's standards. However things we take for granted now like crash reporting, emailed bug reports, etc just didn't exist, so a lot of devs just never found out they'd written buggy code and couldn't do anything even if they did. Maybe it felt like the results were reliable but really you were often just in the dark about whether people were experiencing bugs at all. This is the origin of war stories like how Windows 95 would detect and effectively hot-patch SimCity to work around memory corruption bugs in it that didn't show up in Windows 3.1.

Manual testing was no replacement for automated testing even if you had huge QA teams. They could do a good job of finding new bugs and usability issues compared to the devs-only unit testing mentality we tend to have today, but they were often quite poor at preventing regressions because repeating the same things over and over was very boring, and by the time they found the issue you may have been running out of time anyway.

I did some Windows 95 programming and Win3.1 too. Maybe you could fully understand what it was doing if you worked at Microsoft. For the rest of us, these were massive black boxes with essentially zero debugging support. If anything went wrong you got either a crash, or an HRESULT error code which might be in the headers if you're lucky, but luxuries like log files, exceptions, sanity checkers, static analysis tools, useful diagnostic messages etc were just totally absent. Windows programming was (and largely still is) essentially an exercise in constantly guessing why the code you just wrote wasn't working or was just drawing the wrong thing with no visibility into the source code. HTML can be frustratingly similar in some ways - if you do something wrong you just silently get the wrong results a lot of the time. But compared to something more modern like JavaFX/Jetpack Compose it was the dark ages.

[pjc50]

I'm reminded of the Windows 95 uptime bug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28340101 that nobody found for years because you simply couldn't keep a Windows system up that long. Something would just crash on you and bluescreen the whole thing, or you needed to touch a mandatory-reboot setting or install some software.

[samstave]

running FF on a windows 11 flagship HPE OMEN gaming laptop right now and this bitch crashes at LEAST once a day.

[AstralStorm]

I get forced restarts on Windows 10 due to .net updates only. These tend to ensure applications that ran on previous CLR cannot run until the shutdown thing does the job of rebuilding everything, and it's not done online.

[bombcar]

Reliable and buggy can go together - after all, nobody left their computer running for days on end back then, so you almost always had a "fresh slate" when starting up. And since programs would crash, you were more trained to save things.

The other major aspect was that pre-internet, security was simply not an issue at all; since each machine was local and self-contained there wasn't "elite hax0rs" breaking into your box; the most there was were floppy-copied viruses.

[fd111]

> a lot of devs just never found out they'd written buggy code and couldn't do anything even if they did.

This is undoubtedly true. No doubt there are countless quietly-malfunctioning embedded systems all around the world.

There also exist highly visible embedded systems such as on-air telephone systems used by high-profile talents in major radio markets around the country. In that environment malfunctions rarely go unnoticed. We'd hear about them literally the day of discovery. It's not that there were zero bugs back then, just nothing remotely like the jira-backlog-filling quantities of bugs that seem to be the norm today.

[PaulHoule]

This was what passed for an "AAA" game in 1980

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_I:_The_First_Age_of_Dar...

it was coded up in about a year by two people who threw in just about every idea they got.

[treis]

1980 wasn't about 30 years ago, though. 30 years ago is 1992 which is Wolfenstein 3D, Civilization, and Final Fantasy type games. It's on the cusp of games like Warcraft, C&C, Ultima Online, Quake, Diablo, and Everquest. Games that are, more or less, like what we have now but with much much worse graphics.

[hnthrowaway0328]

In 1992 (and pretty much in a good part of the 90s) it was still possible and practical to build a small dev team (under 10) and push out incredible titles. IIRC Both ID Software and the team that worked on Diablo were relatively small-ish.

Nowadays we have to look to indie studios.

[krumpet]

You're not going to be believe this, but I'm still working on Ultima IV. I come back to it every 3-4 years and spin up a new player and start over. I love it, but never can seem to commit enough time to build up all my virtues.

[unilynx]

It was also very unforgiving - one mistake and you were back to rebuilding that virtue.

[dunham]

I recall that on one of my play-throughs as a kid, I got everything done except my characters needed to be level 8. So I un-virtuously tweaked the save file. (I think that was Ultima IV, but it's been a while.)

I also tweaked a later Ultima to not need the floppy disk in the drive. The budget copy protection had added itself to the executable and stored the real start address in a bad sector on disk, so I just patched the real start address back into the EXE header.

[hnthrowaway0328]

I read somewhere that Ultima V is the last Ultima that Lord British did the majority programming work. For Ultima VI he was convinced that he need a full team to get it done.

I still think it should be rather doable (and should be done by any aspiring game programmers) for a one man team to complete a Ultima V spin-off (same graphics, same complexity but on modern platforms) nowadays. Modern computers, languages and game engines abstract away a lot of the difficulties.

[mschaef]

Completely agreed. The tile based graphics that pushed the limits of a mid-80's computer (and in some cases required special hardware) can now be done off the cuff with totally naive code in a matter of a couple hours:

https://github.com/mschaef/waka-waka-land

There's lots more room these days for developing the story, etc. if that's the level of production values you wish to achieve.

[mech422]

I actually got turned down by Chuckles for my first 'real' programming job ... They wanted someone that actually played the games :-) It was a neat experience interviewing though - I was really surprised they had offices in New Hampshire.

[acomjean]

This guy? Chuck "Chuckles" Beuche?

they interview him on the "Apple Time Warp" series. He wrote "Caverns of Calisito" at origin. The optimizations they came up with to make things work was crazy. (I think they were drawing every third line to speed things up and had self modifying code).

https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/

or youtube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0o94loqgK3CMz7VEkDiIgA/vid...

good resource on Apple programing 40ish years ago.

[PaulHoule]

I grew up in Manchester, it was years after I left that I realized Origin games had a development office right by the airport.

[ravenstine]

And now we have AAA games that take 6+ years to make and still ship unfinished and broken. What a weird time we live in.

[pcthrowaway]

Ultima I was a phenomenal game, but also incredibly hard by today's standards

[mgkimsal]

Throwing up another Ultima memory...

I've got great memories of Ultima II on C64 and some Apple II as well. It was far more expansive than I, but still relatively fast. I remember when III came out, it was just... comparatively slow as molasses. It was more involved, but to the point where it became a multi day event, and it was too easy to lose interest waiting for things to load. II was a great combination of size/breadth/complexity and speed.

Then I got Bard's Tale... :)

[h4t]

speaking of Ultima www.uooutlands.com/

Been playing this recently. It is Ultima Online but with all the right choices rather than all the wrong choices post 1999 the development studio made. Anyone who enjoys Online RPGs should certainly give it a try. The graphics don't do the game justice at all but the quality of the game makes up for this and then some.

[dleslie]

This is why I drifted towards game development for most of my career. Consoles, until the penultimate (antipenultimate?) generation, ran software bare or nearly bare on the host machine.

I also spent time in integrate display controller development and such; it was all very similar.

Nowadays it feels like everything rides on top some ugly and opaque stack.

[dijit]

For context of what this guy is saying: the modern Xbox's (after 360) are actually running VMs for each game. This is part of why despite the hardware being technically (marginally) superior: Xbox tends to have lower graphical fidelity.

[mywittyname]

The 360 has a Type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor. So there's not much, if any, performance impact to having it since the software runs natively on the hardware.

Microsoft used a hypervisor primarily for security. They wanted to ensure that only signed code could be executed and wanted to prevent an exploit in a game from allowing the execution of unsigned code with kernel privileges on the system itself.

Every ounce of performance lost to the hypervisor is money Microsoft wasted in hardware costs. So they had an incentive to make the HyperV as performant as possible.

[dijit]

the 360 has no hypervisor.

The CPU had an emulator that you could run on x86 Windows, but it was not itself a hypervisor.

The hypervisor in the XB1 served a more important purpose: to provide developers a way of shipping the custom SDK to clients, and not forcing them to update it. This was quite important for software stability and in fact we made a few patches to MS's XB1 SDK (Durango) to optimise it for our games.

VM's are VM's, there are performance trade-offs.

I know this because I worked on AAA games before in this area, do you also work in games and are repeating something you think. you heard?

[mywittyname]

I don't work in the industry. But just because you "worked on AA games" before doesn't make you correct.

This detailed architectural overview of the 360 discusses the hypervisor:

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-360/

This YouTuber, who is an industry vet, and has done several xbox ports claims the XB360 has a hypervisor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq1lxeg_gNs

And there entries in the CVE database for the XB360 which describe the ability to run code in "hypervisor mode":

https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2007-1221/

This detailed article on the above exploit goes into detail on how the memory model works on the XB360, including how main memory addressing works differently in hypervisor mode than in real mode:

https://www.360-hq.com/article1435.html

That's a whole lot of really smart people discussing a topic that you claim doesn't exist.

[dijit]

Appreciate the detailed reply!

> This detailed architectural overview of the 360 discusses the hypervisor:

> https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-360/

Yes, the 128KB of key storage and W^X. That's not a hypervisor in the sense that the XB1/HyperV or VMWare have a hypervisor, they shouldn't even share a name it's not the same thing at all.

It's like calling the JVM is a virtual machine in the same way QEMU is.

The 360 "Hypervisor" is more akin to a software T2 chip than anything that actually virtualises.

[black3r]

360 indeed uses hypervisor [0], but uses it only for security, to make the app signature verification run on a higher level.

Windows on PCs also runs under hypervisor if you enable some security features (e.g. VBS/HVCI which are on by default since Windows 11 2022 update, or Windows Sandbox, or WDAG) or enable Hyper-V itself (e.g. to use WSL2/Docker).

The performance losses are indeed there, but by purely running the hypervisor you lose just around 1% [1], because the only overhead is added latency due to accessing memory through SLAT and accessing devices through IOMMU...

I'd imagine XB1 is running with all the security stuff enabled though, which demands additional performance losses [2]..

[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2005-11-29-the-hypervisor-and-its-i...

[1]: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1022616-the-real-world-impac...

[2]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-11-gaming-benchmar...

[ComputerGuru]

There’s no reason a pass through GPU configuration in a vm would have lower graphical fidelity.

[AstralStorm]

There is a reason but it would only harm particularly poorly written games and even then a single digit percentage.

To excercise that you need a lot of separate memory transfers. Tiny ones. Games tend to run bulky transfers instead of many megabytes.

Memory bandwidth and command pipe should not see an effect even with the minimally increased latency, on any HVM.

[ComputerGuru]

Again with the caveat that this is specific to dom0 virtualization taking advantage of full hardware acceleration VT-d/VT-x, etc, what you say isn’t even necessarily the case.

With modern virtualization tech, the hypervisor mainly sets things up then steps out of the way. It doesn’t have to involve itself at all in the servicing of memory requests (or mapped memory requests) because the cpu does the mapping and knows what accesses are allowed or aren’t. The overhead you’re talking about is basically traversing one extra level in a page table noticeable only on micro benchmarks when filling the tlb or similar - this is a change in performance you might encounter a micro-regression in (without any virtualization to speak of) even when going from one generation of cpu architecture to the next.

Theoretically, the only time you’ll have any overhead is on faults (and even then, not all of them).

Of course I guess you could design a game to fault on every memory request or whatever, but that would be a very intentionally contrived scenario (vs just plain “bad” code).

[dijit]

Hello ComputerGuru,

As you may understand: there's more to graphical fidelity than just the GPU itself.

CPU<->GPU bandwidth (and GPU memory bandwidth) are also important.

There is a small but not insignificant overhead to these things with virtualisation: VMs don't come for free.

[marshray]

"Pass through GPU configuration" means that GPU memory is mapped directly into guest address space in hardware.

Bandwidth from a VM partition should be identical to that from the root partition.

[dijit]

I don’t understand what you’re trying to imply here.

Are you seriously suggesting that I chose to downgrade the graphics on the XB1 because I felt like it, and that dozens of other AAA game studios did the same thing?

Our engine was Microsoft native, by all rights it should have performed much better than PS4.

If you’re going to argue you’ll have to do a lot better than that since I have many years of lived experience with these platforms.

[p1necone]

Lower graphical fidelity than what? PlayStation?

[dijit]

> Marginally superior to what? PlayStation?

Precisely

Both the original Xbox One and the Xbox One S have a custom, 1.75GHz AMD 8-core CPU, while the Xbox One X bumps that up to a 2.3GHz 8-core chip. The base PS4 CPU remained clocked at 1.6GHz and contains a similar custom AMD 8-core CPU with x86-based architecture, while the PS4 Pro bumps that clock speed up to 2.13GHz.

EDIT: you’ve edited your comment, but also yes.

[p1necone]

The CPU isn't particularly relevant is it (although the CPUs in the PS4/XBone generation were exceptionally terrible compared to what was standard on PCs at the time)? Graphical fidelity is going to depend much more on the GPU (although the CPU is going to bottleneck framerate if it's not powerful enough).

In the current generation the Series X has a more powerful GPU than the PS5, which tends to mean a lot of games run at higher resolutions on the system, although there's some games that run slightly better on PS5 (I think the Call of Duty games might be in that category?). And a lot (most?) are basically the same across both systems - probably because devs aren't bothering to tweak cross platform games separately for the two different consoles.

[treis]

>This was it, even into the 90s you could reasonable "fully understand" what the machine was doing, even with something like Windows 95 and the early internet. That started to fall apart around that time and now there are so many abstraction layers you have to choose what you specialize in.

This doesn't really track. 30 years ago computers were, more or less, the same as they are now. The only major addition has been graphics cards. Other than that we've swapped some peripherals. Don't really see how someone could "fully understand" the modem, video drivers, USB controllers, motherboard firmware, processor instruction sets, and the half dozen or so more things that went into a desktop.

[zengargoyle]

This is why you fail. Thirty years ago I could make a wire wrapped 68000k board that did nothing but play music. CE/CS was different back then. I'd cut pins and solder in chips to twiddle the filters on audio output. You could know the entire process from power on to running of your computer and it was easy to change bits even down to the hardware level like adding a 'no place to put it unless you build it yourself' CPU/MPU/RAM upgrade and make it work. Adjust your NTSC video output, just cut that resistor in lieu of replacing it with something really high resistance, it'll be better. Let's build our own new high speed serial port for MIDI. How about a graphics co-processor that only does Mandlebrot calculations, let's build three of them. Only few of the younger generation comprehend the old ways. And the machines have changed to fewer chips and machines have turned into system on a chip. It's a bit of a shame.

[Dracophoenix]

Where did one acquire your kind of knowledge outside of a university? Were there any books or USENET groups that you visited to attain it?

[KerrAvon]

You would build a wire wrapped 68000 board in 1992? Isn’t that a tiny bit late to expend that much effort on a 68000?

[relaxing]

Not at all. I was still building embedded hardware around 68k 10 years later. There are undoubtedly new products being built around 68k today.

If all you want to do is synthesize music the 68k is perfect.

If you’re taking issue with wire wrap, there just weren’t general purpose dev boards available back then. You were expected to be able to roll your own.

[airbreather]

Wire wrap is the most reliable form of construction, used by NASA for many years for this reason - the wrapping of the wire around the square pegs creates a small cold weld at every corner.

Plus when mulitlayer boards were not really a thing, wirewrap gives you all the layers you want, more or less.

[bombcar]

30 years ago was DOS computers - usb certainly wasn’t widespread even if it was out, and many of the video drivers at the time were “load palette here, copy memory there” type things.

[ksec]

As mentioned, we didn't have USB controller until 1996. But even if you included that, which was an order of magnitude more complex than parallel port, USB 1.0 spec was only about 100 pages long. And yes you could reasonably understand what was going on there.

[samstave]

the crazy thing to me is just how many different workflows/UI/UX you need to learn along so many platforms today. AWS, GCP, Azure - like you need to learn so much deeply about each in order to be "marketable" and the only way you shall learn all of them is if you happen to work at a company that happens to rely on said platform.

Then there is low-level training of ILO bullshit that ive done weeks training on for HPE and I have building and dealing with HPE servers since before the bought COMPAQ....

And dont even get me started on SUN and SGI... how much brain power was put into understanding those two extinct critters... fuck even CRAY.

there is so much knowledge that has to evaporate in the name of progress....

[thfuran]

Yeah, it's definitely great but also terrible that bugs can be patched so easily now.

[samstave]

Just so its documented ;; may you plz ELI5 how easy a bug is to patch today? Thanks

[bombcar]

When DOOM was released in 1993 it spread like wildfire across bulletin boards and early FTP services. But the vast majority of players got it from a floppy copy at their local computer store - it was shareware, and so copying the floppy was fine. They even encouraged stores to charge for the shareware game, they wanted it distributed as widely as possible.

And if you paid the $40 for the full game, you got floppies mailed to you.

There was no easy way for the company to let you know there was an update available (the early versions had some well-known bugs) so the user would have to go searching for it, or hear a rumor at the store. If you called id, they'd have to mail you a disk with the updated executable on it. This was all confusing, time consuming, and was only for a game.

Things were much worse with operating systems and programs.

Now almost every piece of software is either distributed via an App Store of some sort that has built-in updates, or has a "Check for updates" button in the app itself. Post an updated build and within days a huge percentage of your users will be running the latest software.

[eddieroger]

This makes me saddest in the game market with day-one patching. I'm old enough to remember bringing a game home, plugging in the cart and playing it, but if I was to do that now with a disc or cart, there is likely a download in my future. At least some of the game publishers will pre-download so I can play when the game is made available, but I miss the days (not the bugs) of instant playing once the game was acquired.

[hirvi74]

> if I was to do that now with a disc or cart, there is likely a download in my future.

The newest Call of Duty (was released this past Friday) was released on disc as well as the various digital forms. Apparently, the disc was only contained ~72mb of data for a game that easily cleans 100gb when fully installed.

[fallat]

I miss the days when bugs were extra content. B)

[fragmede]

For history. We're at time where SaaS is ascendant and CI/CD tools are everywhere. This means that to patch a bug, you fix the code, commit it, and then it magically makes it way to production, within like an hour, sometimes less. Customers are interacting with your product via a web browser, so they refresh the page and receive the new version of the software. Compared to times of old, with physical media and software that needed installing, it's ridiculously easier.

[samstave]

grats on this reply... even though ELI5 context will have to have some domain knowledge... but this was a great response, thanks.

[fragmede]

It's fascinating to think about a historian from the future, coming along and reading about the day to day lives of a 2020's developer and them just being enamored and asking about the most mundane details of our lives that we never considered or at all document. What colorschemes did they use in VScode? What kinds of keyboards did they use? What's a webpack?

[samstave]

In 2014 it was writen that Sergi Brin (goog founder) had a genetic future-forming-cancer gene and he was funding pharma around it....

so I posted this to reddi May 2 2014....

===

Fri, May 2, 2014, 4:49 PM

to me

In the year 2010, scientists perfected suspended animation through the use of cryogenics for the purpose of surgery. After more than a decade of study and refinement, long term suspended animation became a reality, yet a privilege reserved for only the most wealthy and influential.

The thinking at the time was that only those who showed a global and fundamental contribution to society (while still viewed through the ridiculously tinted lenses of the global elite of the era) were worthy of entering into such state.

The process was both incredibly complex and costly. As each Transport, as they were known, required their own stand alone facility to be built around them. Significant resources were put into the development of each facility as they required complete autonomous support systems to accommodate whatever duration was selected by the Transport.

Standalone, yet fully redundant, power, security and life support systems were essential to the longevity of each facility.

Additionally, it was recognized that monetary resources would be subject to change over time, especially fiat-currency based resources. Thus there was a need to place physical holders of value that would be perceived to not deplete/dilute over time into the facilities for use by the Transport when they resuscitate.

These resources are the most sought after treasure of the new world.

After hundreds of years of human progress, civilization could no longer sustain itself in an organized self-supporting system. Through utter corruption of what some call the human soul, the world has fallen dark. There are very few outposts of safety in the current Trial of Life, as its now known.

Many Transporters have been found, resuscitated and exploited already. There are believed to be many many more, but their locations are both secret and secure. Akin to your life relying on the discovery of an undisturbed Tomb of a Pharaoh - even though every consciousness on the planet is also seeking the same tomb.

They are the last bastion of hope for they alone have the reserves of precious materials needed to sustain life for the current generation.

Metals, technology (however outdated), medicines, seeds, weapons and minerals are all a part of each Transport 'Crop'.

One find can support a group or community for years alone based on the barter and renewable resource potentials in each Crop.

One transport, found in 2465, that of a long dead nanotech pioneer - who was purportedly responsible for much of the cybernetic medical capabilities of the 21st century, which he sought to cure his genetic predisposition for a certain disease, was so vast that the still powerful city-state in the western province of North America was able to be founded.

The resources of this individual were extraordinary, but his resuscitation, as they all are, was rather gruesome and cold.

The security systems in each Transport Facility are biometric and very complex. They can only be accessed by a living, calm and (relatively) healthy Transport.

If the system, and its control mechanism AI, detect signs of duress, stress or serious injury to the Transport - they go into fail-safe. Which is to say they self detonate. Taking with them all resources, the Transport and the Seekers as well.

There have been many instances of this, such that the art of successful Resuscitation has become an extremely profitable business.

The most active and successful Resuscitation Team (RT) have been the ironically named, Live Well Group.

The most conniving, well practiced and profitable con in the history of mankind.

LWG alone has been responsible for the resuscitation of more than 370 Transports. Their group is currently the most powerful in the world. With their own city-state, established after the Brin case mentioned, they have a cast of thousands of cons all working to ensure the Transport believes they have been Awakened to a new, advanced, safe world and that they would be allowed to stake part in a significant way now that they have been Transported.

They are fooled into releasing their resources, then brutally tortured for information about any other Transports or any other knowledge they may possess, which invariably is less than nothing.

It is a hard world out there now, and the LWGs ruthlessly strive to locate the thousands of other Transport Facilities is both the worst aspect of our modern struggle - yet ironically will serve to be the basis of the ongoing endeavor of the species.

There is rumor of a vast facility of resources and Transports in an underground 'CITY' of the most elite Transports ever. A facility supposedly comprised of the 13 most powerful and rich bloodlines of people to have ever existed.

It is not known which continent this facility is on, but I believe it is in Antarctica - fully automated and with the ability to auto-resuscitate at a given time.

This is my mission, this is my life's work. To find and own this facility and crush any and all other groups that oppose me.

[dec0dedab0de]

Today you can use the internet to patch a bug on a users computer, and the users expect this, and even allow you to patch bugs automatically.

Previously, patching bugs meant paying money for physical media and postage.

[jerf]

I've been trying to teach my young teenage kids about how things work, like, washing machines, cars, etc. One of the things I've learned is that it's a looooot easier to explain 20th century technology than 21st century technology.

Let me give you an example. My father was recently repairing his furnace in his camper, which is still a 20th century technology. He traced the problem to the switch that detects whether or not air is flowing, because furnaces have a safety feature such that if the air isn't flowing, it shuts the furnace off so it doesn't catch on fire. How does this switch work? Does it electronically count revolutions on a fan? Does it have two temperature sensors and then compute whether or not air is flowing by whether their delta is coming down or staying roughly the same temperature? Is it some other magical black box with integrated circuits and sensors and complexity greater than the computer I grew up with?

No. It's really simple. It's a big metal plate that sticks out into the airflow and if the air is moving, closes a switch. Have a look: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dometic-31094-RV-Furnace-Heater-S... You can look at that thing, and as long as you have a basic understanding of electronics, and the basic understanding of physics one gets from simply living in the real world for a few years, you can see how that works.

I'm not saying this is better than what we have now. 21st century technology exists for a reason. Sometimes it is done well, sometimes it is done poorly, sometimes it is misused and abused, it's complicated. That fan switch has some fundamental issues in its design. It's nice that they are also easy to fix, since it's so simple, but I wouldn't guarantee it's the "best" solution. All I'm saying here is that this 20th century technology is easier to understand.

My car is festooned with complicated sensors and not just one black box, but a large number of black boxes with wires hooked in doing I have no idea what. For the most part, those sensors and black boxes have made cars that drive better, last longer, are net cheaper, and generally better, despite some specific complaints we may have about them, e.g., lacking physical controls. But they are certainly harder to understand than a 20th century car.

Computers are the same way. There is a profound sense in which computers today really aren't that different than a Commodore 64, they just run much faster. There are also profound senses in which that is not true; don't overinterpret that. But ultimately these things accept inputs, turn them into numbers, add and subtract them really quickly in complicated ways, then use those numbers to make pictures so we can interpret them. But I can almost explain to my teens how that worked in the 20th century down to the electronics level. My 21st century explanation involves a lot of handwaving, and I'm pretty sure I could spend literally a full work day giving a spontaneous, off-the-cuff presentation of that classic interview question "what happens when you load a page in the web browser" as it is!

[teddyh]

> This was it, even into the 90s you could reasonable "fully understand" what the machine was doing

That was always an illusion, only possible if you made yourself blind to the hardware side of your system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988103

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21003535

[the-printer]

Your habit of citing yourself with the appropriate references has led me from taking your stance as an extremely literal one (“understanding all of the layers; literally”) to actually viewing your point as…very comprehensive and respectful to the history of technology while simultaneously rendering the common trope that you are addressing as just that, a trope.

Thanks, teddyh.

[bombcar]

Fully understand and “completely able/worth my time to fix” are not identical. I can understand how an alternator works and still throw it away when it dies rather than rebuild it.

[teddyh]

In that case, what is the value proposition of investing the time to learn how an alternator works? It surely has some value, but is it worth the time it takes to know it?

To bring it back to our topic, is it worth it to know, on an electrical level, what your motherboard and CPU is doing? It surely has some value, but is it worth the time to learn it?

[relaxing]

You’re just saying you didn’t go to school for science or engineering. Plenty of people program and also understand the physics of a vacuum tube or capacitor. Sometimes we really had to know, when troubleshooting an issue with timing or noise in a particular signal on a PC board or cable.