| ▲ | marginalia_nu 3 hours ago | |
A lot of the choices were to be fair quite accidental. Computers didn't use to be like this, but a lot of the reasons they weren't were properties of how the technology worked. A low-DPI 15" CRT monitor simply can't display very much information at any given moment. A slow single core CPU just doesn't permit browsing the web while your code is compiling. As that changed, we simply piled on multitasking capabilities without asking if we should. But yeah, it's an interesting space to experiment in. I feel we could be doing much of this a lot better than we are now. My mise-en-place work accounts is very much a hack, and considerable work to set up. | ||
| ▲ | projektfu 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Before 1992, we browsed newsgroups, watched TV, or played with swords while compiling. That is, if you weren't using Turbo Pascal, with its near-instantaneous turnaround. | ||