[jnpnj]

Could you tell us more about your grandma point of view (if she ever told you more of course).

With age I'm becoming jaded with computing, not personal computers per se, but the overwhelming space taken by them now (especially due to cheap networking I guess).

[jordwest]

She just didn't see the point in them, she enjoyed a simple life, grew up with little but had a full life and didn't see the need for more. She would ask me as a kid "you've been playing the television again have you?". I don't think she ever really understood that to me it was a creative tool.

I did manage to convince her to try a VR headset at one point and despite her protests she clearly enjoyed it. Afterwards she said "what a silly gadget" haha. I'm realising now that I have similar feelings about generative AI.

[jnpnj]

Hehe yeah we all have our own tastes based on time. But I'm also interested about the perception of computers. I too was enamoured with the creative possibilities of it. But nowadays I see a detrimental trend in how aesthetics are born on computers. The cleanliness, the recurrent patterns. A lot of pre-computing visuals were really different, none of it would qualify as nice today, but it was seen a cute before, and I kind of miss the less structured, less obvious, less shiny approach. It was also material, a different game, with constraints about possible colours, shape and precision you know. It also distracts us too much and creates real mind issues (I struggle with strange behaviors when browsing, near no attention-span etc)

So now I rebalance things and put computers in a smaller niche, not the centre of gravity.

[jordwest]

I can totally relate, funny enough I find myself drifting back to really appreciating old school interfaces and pixel fonts lately. I've been enjoying using the old IBM DOS font [1] [2] in my editor, terminal etc.

Hard to tell if it's just nostalgia, but all the smoothing, drop shadows, antialiasing (and now blurring with MacOS 26) feel so unnecessary and hardly even pretty anymore.

There's something nice about computer interfaces that just look like computer interfaces instead of pretending they're something else.

IMO part of it is that the older interfaces trusted the intelligence of the user to understand the abstractions below the interface, while newer software assumes the user is dumb in order to capture the largest possible market share. In the 90s it was "RTFM", now it's "your software sucks if it's not obvious". But what we lost in that is that interfaces now abstract away what's actually going on underneath.

Maybe this preference for the old way is part of the reason for the resurgence of TUIs.

    [1] https://viznut.fi/unscii/
    [2] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

[jnpnj]

I ask myself the same questions. And I see other people discussing this on HN or other websites (old video games culture for instance).

I too feel that the computing aesthetic has vanished, somehow on purpose, a lot of efforts were aimed at making gpus and browser able to emulate anything (magazine, movies), so that's what apps do.

And I also agree about the balance between the tool and user. Limitations forced UIs to be organized, structured in some simple ways, they would do enough work to do some of the work, but the rest was on you to grasp the abstractions and ideas around. The software became something to immerse yourself in to gain more. That was part of the magic.