What does it say about me that the tech I find the most exciting is old, niche, low end, obsolete or decidedly not bleeding edge? Or does it say something about the tech world as a whole?

@kelbot feats of engineering that were required to get the first spreadsheet program to work in the constrained environment of PCs back then were fascinating and imaginative.

Today you slap some JS on a mutilated web browser, call it "desktop client", and ignore the fact that it uses 2GiB of RAM to do something a meg or two would suffice for.

@kelbot Its a great question. I lived a lot of retro computing and while I have some nostalgia for it, I'm also not interested in 40 character column word processing anymore either.

Perhaps its the perceived mastery and total control you could have over older tech?

My main memories of the oldest tech is "difficult and unreliable" for the most part. Super cool in the day, tho.

@kelbot whatever it says about you; it must also say about me. 🙂

@kelbot

I was asking @avalon last night if there was a word that meant, "Worse, which makes me like it better."

Something close to the opposite of neophile, yet without the implication of nostalgia.

@rysiek Very good point. That is what I find fun about the low end constrained things like dirt cheap SBCs and the like. The creativity of making this constrained system do fun and useful things is much more beautiful than throwing someone elses complexity and money at it.

@gedvondur Yes, I think there is some glossing over the ugly parts of the old days in tech but some of us look fondly on surpassing that as well. I look at the good parts of the earlier days in tech and then imagine how if those good parts had been expanded on and the bad parts done away with how great it could have been. We got rid of a lot of the bad parts but we didn't expand on the good parts as much as I'd hoped.

@kelbot that's what I find fun about playing with HTML+CSS and looking what can be done in just that constrained system, without JS.

Constraints create art. Constraints create the frame for creativity. Lack of constraints is boring.

Reminds me of "Superman is not brave" moment from "Angus":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgIv6KoJw_A

@RussSharek By worse do you mean less featureful? I definitely prefer simpler software to all the ones that attempt to do far too much and thus do a pretty poor job of a lot of it.

@kemonine Don't make me break out the ASCII art porn
@FiXato

@kelbot

     /\
     \ \
        \ \
        / /
     / /
    _\ \_/\/\
 /  *  \@@ =
|       |Y/
|       |~
 \ /_\ /
    \\ //
     |||
    _|||_
 ( / \ )-Skorch

@kemonine

@kemonine @kelbot

ascii art just doesn't work well on Mastodon :( even with pre-formatting

@FiXato @kemonine
Time to start an XXX gemini capsule.

@kelbot

It wasn't a fully formed thought. I definitely think simple is part of it.

@kelbot

Perhaps also, 'too simplistic to compromise' fits in there too.