[mncharity]

Others have mentioned a limitation-creativity link. But I wonder if there's also an implicit... "impedance match", to the current state of interface devices? "We'll make it more creative and popular by requiring physical punched cards! Think of the lovely chunkchunk-chunkity-chunk sounds!", or "You have to hand punch holes in paper tape!", would seem unlikely. On the other hand, decades-old ux is well matched to decades-old current keyboards.

When I wanted my own laptop more "cozy", without the silliness of "you can only press two keys at a time, so no chords", and "most of it isn't a touch surface, and can't even tell which finger pressed were on the cap", and "it's oblivious to hand pose and gestures above the surface", and "the screen is only 2D and can't even tell where you're looking", I had to kludge the entire stack from hardware to apps. If you could sculpt, dance, and sing code, perhaps 8-bit might have less appeal? Like the appeal of entering programs with faceplate bit toggles instead of a keyboard?

Maybe. Counter argument: pico-8 mobile/tablet. Counter counter, historical state of pico-8 mobile/tablet??

[RetroTechie]

> Others have mentioned a limitation-creativity link. But I wonder if there's also an implicit... "impedance match", to the current state of interface devices?

No, it's a software (& hardware) design issue. Computers just aren't made to be tinker-friendly anymore.

Eg. back in the day, I had a trio of editor+assembler+debugger on MSX2 (often running from RAMdisk). For many programs, edit-assemble-test cycles were a few minutes at most. With nothing loaded, machine would boot into BASIC seconds after power-up.

So: develop on target device, even with that being Z80 based machine with ~256 KB RAM (which was already comfortable). Several vendors of these MSX machines would send you a full schematic / service manual for a nominal fee. Hardware mods were commonplace. Youngsters who'd never touched a computer could be tweaking BASIC programs within an hour. With patience you could wrap your head around the whole machine.

Nowadays: boot computer, wait, click on fancy icons. No default programming environment(s) in sight. 'Poke' some hardware port? Not happening. Modify any of the built-in software? Forget about it. Or at best: first download multiple GB's of development tools, spend the next week(s) buried in documentation. Not for the faint-hearted. Let alone newbies.

Yes, computers have become faster. But also more complex. Some of that complexity is justified. Or even necessary. Much of it is not, and is just heaps & heaps of technologies / abstraction layers & legacy cruft.

[mncharity]

> tinker-friendly [...] complexity. Some [...] necessary. Much of it is not, and is just heaps & heaps of technologies / abstraction layers & legacy cruft.

Nod. That silly only-on-my-own laptop project had a device-driver->full-screen-browser stack, so "Reimplementing wheels - sigh. But no libinput, linux gesture mess, window managers, xlib/wayland, ... - oh dancing-lightly-through-tulips yay!".

I enjoyed lisp machines, which handled complexity differently. DonHopkins comments on a LispM ergonomics thread:[1] "It was not just the hardware, or the software, or the culture, or the interesting problems you could solve, or the zeitgeist of that time in history, but a rich combination of all those things and more, that is so hard to capture, describe or reproduce -- or even believe, if you haven't experienced it first hand. [] Those giant keyboards, with all their wide special purpose buttons topped with hieroglyphic keycap labels, in combination with the huge screen, three button mouse, and of course all the great software turning on and off the little dots on the screen that you could dive into, explore and modify at will, the printed and online documentation, the networked developer support community, all carefully designed to work together seamlessly regardless of cost, gave you the feeling of being in control of a very heavy, expensive, well built, solid, powerful, luxury automobile, with rich [...]".

I guess I was wondering if hardware-wise, part of what allows pico-8 to retain appeal, is we've largely stalled out on a half-century-old keypress-and-mousemove ux plateau. If it used some other "similarly" old interface tech (front-panel bit switches, paper tape, terminals as forms), the appeal would seem less.

The appeals of pico-8 and lispm seem somewhat related. But for lispm's cutting-edge "luxury car" power-user-ness. Perhaps the -8'ness constraint, and resulting bounded goals, is what makes doing the stack tractable (witness smalltalk but-do-you-have-a-library-for-X struggles)? But they've also struggled with adoption, which the Scratch-like lower-barriers-from-lower-ceiling might help with?

The smalltalk folks, with a (also keyboard-mouse) vision of full-stack, but with high-ceiling kid appeal, have struggled with both. And, maybe, XR might offer windows where society's UX and approach to software is more malleable.

So what are the implications for designing a powerful full-stack system that attracts a broad user base? To take advantage of some possible "XR is now gelling - as with phones, we're about to do a giant societal software rewrite - the course of future societal computer-and-software UX is briefly malleable"? Ideally one that instead of mac/lispm tractability-through-singular-hardware, has complexity-handling-power sufficient to blend Z80-to-insaneXR hardware-software diversity into something accessibly/appealingly/cozy tractable?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7893008

[justanothersys]

i've been writing an interface like this called aesthetic.computer and trying to work out a full stack for it - i love the ideas in your writing

[mncharity]

tnx! aesthetic.computer: demo[1], live[2]. Includes chatbots... hmm, so maybe Chat(with app) will someday be as familiar as Save and Paint?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-7UszmI1K4 [2] https://aesthetic.computer/ Then press "Enter" and enter "list".