I think that looking at it from a MHz standpoint is a red herring. How many things can you do per watt now, than you could per watt then?

Better ask, how many things you could do per watt now, if software had that era's leanness?

I occasionally fire up Windows 95 in a VM and marvel at how fast it is. Sometimes I use it for actual tasks, although it is hard to find things Windows 95 is useful for nowadays. My copy has office 97 installed, and I use that for some spreadsheety tasks.

I really like being able to click anything and know I won't see a loading spinner.

Gosh windows 95 was great - especially the ability to navigate the OS from the keyboard alone - At one point I knew W95 so well I could literally navigate the OS by hand without a screen.

An aquaintance at one point changed all the graphics settings to black - so ever screen, menu, text etc was black and you couldnt see anything. I was able to help her by using just the keyboard to navigate to settings and restore defaults. I did it from memory and key-clicks.

Also, it was a fun OS to fuck with people in the nascient realm of virus' of the time, there was setting the desktop as an image and hiding whatever was actually on the desktop so nobody could click on things... remote access BSODs etc.

I'm on an HP flagship gaming laptop now and it consumes probably 1,000 times more power (watts) and Compute to just display this single text entry form on HackerNews than any W95 machine back in the day...

In ~1997 or so I had to shutdown a branch office in San Diego and when I did so, we had a number of plastic sealed boxes of brand-new W95 on 3.5" floppies... I kept them for over a decade and then sold them on Ebay as collectors items for $75 each... and wrote a tale about how they were computing history.

But I had a PDA in 1993 which was by CASIO - and it had a little spreadsheet app on it, and I made a Gematria translator app in it - so I could type in any words and its formulae would spit out all the Gematria numbers for a name (the Celestine Prophecy was a famous book of the time)

That PDA was similar to this one, but less sophisticated - and I had that thing for ~25 years... but unlike OP I didnt take out the battery and it ruind the device.

Back when phones had physical keypad buttons and T9 text, I could send a message without taking the phone out of my pocket. It looked suspicious though

As fond of memories as I have of the time I used Windows 95 and how much I learned from using it as a pre-teen, I mostly remember my maintenance schedule of reinstalling by the entire OS about once every month or so when it broke. I guess that jumpstarted my lifelonglifeling career/hobby of computer fuckery.

My first PDA was a Casio too, I don't remember which exact model but it was a Pocket Viewer and it was great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Viewer

My "true" PDA was an Audiovox Maestro I got used off of eBay. I even got a compact flash modem adapter so I could dial-up using it. I was shocked to see almost 10 years later when I got my first smart phone, a T-Mobile Dash 3G, that the OS had barely changed since the Audiovox Maestro back then!

Not sure there's a point to any of this except my own anecdotal trip down memory lane :)

"Memories... they're basically the only thing you have to think back on"

-- Steven Write

---

I love "anecdotal trips down memory lane" -- because its stunning how much I have done and known in my life that I forget.

I truly regret not listening to my mom's advice to journal.

Well, UX is a spectrum. You can do things instantly on a very old machine if you don't mind using a cli. If what you want to do is a game, you can't get Cyberpunk, but you can get Pacman.

Imagine the speed you could play Pacman on a modern CPU! You could probably play a whole level in nanoseconds.

Oh, I often do. It increases productivity by orders of magnitude.

Oh, but what if you had a text based implementation of cyberpunk? Where your imagination is the GPU (the best one there is)

Alas, my imagination is also text-based (aphantasia).

You mean like A Mind Forever Voyaging?

Apparently 30 days of things, per the article.

Most computers are inefficient per watt due to waiting on IO from the human.

There's always something running in the background (usually dozens of system services) so that's not a problem - plus they scale their consumption depending on power.

Plus the waiting on IO is when they're NOT doing something. When they do (playing video, listing files and rendering thunbnails, processing video in an editing app, rendering the next frame in game, playing a synth part in a music app, applying an effect on a photo, recalculating an Excel after a change, and so on) is when you want them to be fast.

And power consumption is a —among other things— a function of transistor size and process. A lot has changed in 30 years, but our methods of programming these things has veered towards incredible wastefulness.

To put it another way, how much longer battery life would that same psion get if the CPU/board was made with modern transistor sizes.

But demand for software has also grown a lot in that period. If we trained software engineers and demanded quality to the same standards, we would not be able to meet demand.

Those standards were also set by the limitations of hardware, not because people had the will to do better back then.

> I think that looking at it from a MHz standpoint is a red herring. How many things can you do per watt now, than you could per watt then?

Obviously a lot more. The OP said the thing could run in two AAs for a month.

Nowadays, almost nothing can last a month on one charge/set of batteries. The only thing I can think of that might pass is a Kindle, due to the trick where it's literally shut down almost all the time.

I have a ton of devices that would disagree with you. If you run the Psion software on modern hardware, it'll run for two months.

Of course not, because no device can run at super low wattage with such an hypothetical OS.

It's not a hypothetical OS, it's what the Psion runs, and why not?

I did not know that the Psion OS is available for modern SOCs.

It isn't.

The Psion 3, 3A, 3C and 3MX ran EPOC, a proprietary 8086 OS with preemptive multitasking and a full keyboard-only GUI.

But their successors, the Psion 5, 5MX and netBook, ran a rewrite called EPOC32. That was written in C++, is native to ARM, and ran well in 4MB and very well in 8MB. Full preemptive multitasking, touchscreen GUI, networking, IPv4 and more, FAT32 and networking support.

That later was rebranded as Symbian and was the first mass-market smartphone OS. It was the only smartphone OS that could run the GSM comms stack on the same CPU as the user facing GUI OS -- its realtime support was that good. iOS, Android, WinCE, all need a separate CPU with its own RTOS for that.

Symbian is now 100% FOSS.

https://github.com/SymbianSource

It's a crime and a tragedy that nobody's picked it up and ported it to any modern SOC. It is much richer and more complete than any other modern C++ OS such as Genode or Serenity OS.

Ultra low power processors exist:

"GreenArrays is shipping its 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ/inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle).

Tight coding to minimize instructions executed will minimize power. The programmer can also reduce instruction fetches, transistor switching and duty cycle.

Chuck Moore

GreenArrays, Inc."

Source: https://youtu.be/0PclgBd6_Zs

They just are not widely used because ARM and similar processors offer much more computational power and people are happy charging their devices every day or so.

> They just are not widely used because ARM and similar processors offer much more computational power and people are happy charging their devices every day or so.

This is exactly my point. Ultra low power processors exist, but they're not used for consumer electronics. Developers would rather build something bloated, quickly, than take the time to optimize. And technological advancements has taken away a lot of the pressure for optimization (e.g. I'm sure it was a super high priority to get a Psion to sip power, because a recharge was going to the store and paying $4 for a set of new batteries).

If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.

> If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed[^W*] on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.

*tested/run during development exclusively

You still want the text editor and more importantly compiler to run on beefy workstation hardware, in order to avoid programmer productivity problems like long compilation times[0] and to take advantage of CPU-intensive optimization techniques.

0: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/303

> If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.

Agreed! I wish there were widespread ways of throttling CPU and memory given to desktop applications today. If I'm testing a web application, I tell Firefox to throttle my network down to GPRS and see the responsiveness (or lack thereof) and once my work is done and GPRS is reasonably fast (or whatever) I can give a quick glance at normal 4G speeds and see my web app screams now.

So why can't I lock a desktop application to settings like "an unused 386 PC with 24MB of RAM"?

That's pointless since you need to recharge your device all the time. It's not progress if you have a lighter that needs gas every 2 minutes to work.

Except the lighter nowadays is a flamethrower. You can get a lighter that needs gas every month, or a flamethrower that needs gas every two minutes, but complaining that the flamethrower needs much more gas than the lighter is silly.

The problem is there are only flamethrowers now and no lighters.

I'm fairly sure you can still boy dumb phones that last a week+ though.

I think the argument is that we mostly want to accomplish the same sorts of things, but now we have to use a flamethrower.

But we don't, even the fact that we browse the Web and watch videos would have been impossible on a Nokia 3210.

We have been doing all of this since the 90s at least on desktop computers. Smartphones today are far more powerful than desktop computers from that era.

> doing all of this since the 90s at least on desktop computers

it wasn’t a very nice experience. Why would I want to watch anything in 240p win stead of 4k? Same for web, despite the bloat UX on most websites is miles ahead of what was common back in ~2000

Probably the memory is more relevant. 1 or 2 MB!

Ive looked for a 5mx form factor in the form of a phone and not been able to find it.

Planet Computers? https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/

One day I will find an excuse to get one of these; they induce a heavy sense of nostalgia but I just don’t know what I’d do with it

It's a superb portable writing tool, as was the Psion 5 in its day. The keyboard is better than anything available on any tablet or pocketable device in the world in any market. It's that good. No Surface or iPad addon comes even close; it is an order of magnitude better than any mainstream vendor's offering.

I found it almost useless as a phone or tablet, though. But I have several of those so I don't care.

I highly recommend against anything from these guys. The software situation was dreadful, they pumped out new nearly-identical hardware too quick without fixing gemini issues. Seems like a cash grab. My Gemini PDA sits in my closet, I consider it near-useless with its electrically buggy keyboard and old android/ubuntu images.

The PinePhone with its keyboard addon should fix most if not all issues the Gemini PDA had, but it looked so similar I still couldn't bring myself to get the keyboard for it. Plus I don't like the layout at all.

MNT Pocket Reform seems very promising (but expensive). Good layout and reprogrammable keyboard. Not stuck on an old Android version.

The pinephone would be perfect were it possible to install, e.g. android banking apps on it.

Same here. I had a gemini but beside the poor software there was also the wobbliness of the display hinge that was super annoying. It was because they made it of springy metal.

Also, the keyboard looks the exact same as the Psion 5's but the mechanism is much worse.

I could have written your comment! Though I sold mine.

I followed pocket reform closely but the thickness of it, combined with the price, put me off. It’s not the same class of device as Psion, Gemini, or the UMPCs.

Just for balance:

I have a Gemini. I love it and still use it. The keyboard remains world-class, best of breed in any pocket-sized device. The OS is dated but still works fine and connectivity to Dropbox, gDrive, OneDrive etc. is very handy and mostly missing from desktop Linux.

As a pocketable laptop replacement it is unequalled, for this writer.

Don’t get me wrong I’m very glad they built it, happy to share some risk to get a niche product to market, and used it as a daily driver for some time.

Curious though, did the whole unit bounce, with the screen wobbling back and forward, when you typed?

Nope, it's pretty firm. The design isn't as good as the Psion 5, but it's OK. I mainly place it on my lap on something like a book, or preferably, on a desk or tabletop. Then I can type on it at about 60 WPM, which is about 3/4 of my speed on a full-sized keyboard such as my preferred IBM Model M.

I occasionally can't remember where a character is, but I tell myself it's where it would be on a Psion and 20th century muscle memory kicks in and I just hit that combo.

Interesting. I've heard other reports of the hinge wobbling. I wonder if there was a production issue with the material or geometry or something.

Found this random video on youtube. You can see it wobbling at 15 seconds, though mine was more accentuated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opmb6jbeBY4

Interesting. No, I haven't noticed that. Maybe if one particular unit's keyboard works well, you don't have to hit the keys so hard, so it doesn't push down on the hinge mechanism.

Psion's own hinge mech was far better, but PlanComp only licensed the keyboard, not the case. I proposed a fatter "pro" model with a bigger battery that was the same size, shape and form factor as the original, so it'd fit in original cases. I still have several.

I was shouted down by Americans whose internal airlines apparently have or had some stupid limit on the size of battery you can carry on board. In Europe any battery over a certain limit has to be carried in the cabin, so if it fails the crew can extinguish it.

Just tried a gemini from them this month, and the software support is awful. Highly recommend against

I found the forums in which people had provided recipes for updates to Debian and Android to be helpful but it was a lot of work and should have been supported by the vendor, I agree.

They never released fully functional Linux support

>They never released fully functional Linux support

Which is something that killed my interest dead for their hardware despite being exactly the kind of person who should fit their profile for a customer. But if they're willing to lie about Linux support, what else will they lie about? SO I continue to look...

I had a gemini, but the hinge fell apart Shame, I quite liked it.

I have an Astro Slide 5G from them (though bought via ebay) and I'm happy with my purchase, but it's kind of hard to recommend. Their track record on actually shipping pre-orders is kinda lousy (why I resorted to buying one second hand), the keyboard has some quality control issues and the software side feels a bit half-baked. For instance, there's almost always an undismissable "System Update" notification despite no updates being available. They did recently ship a system update which fixed some issues so they haven't abandoned it, but they have a ways to go still.

I really want them to succeed. It's such a cool device

Not to overly denigrate some of the more pessimistic reply here, I have to say that my Gemini was easily one of the best computers (not just phone) I ever had.

The keyboard was fantastic (better than the much larger GPD Pocket 1 that I also got at the same time), and with a fully-fleshed out termux install, I ended up coding on that thing far more than I probably should have.

Yes, Planet Computers have a very poor record on delivering machines (still waiting for my Astro Slide), but the hardware, when done right (Planet again are poor when it comes to QA, which might explain some of the other responses), is great.

I think the keyboard designer (who also did the original Psuon 5 keyboards, back in the day - I had one of those also), is really an idiot for letting his design be run into the ground by the sheer business incomptence that is Planet Computers. He should team up with a company that CAN deliver, then more could see that the great Psion5 isn't really dead

Did you find the Gemini PDA and friends? It's very very similar.

Wish I had heard about these before getting my GPD Win2. Looks much closer to what I wanted but didn't know was still an option.

I've got the GPD Win 2 and it really would be the perfect little computer if it had HP 100LX style calculator keys. I know people disagree with me on this, but it's the one style of tiny keyboard that I have been able to achieve a relatively fast typing speed with.

I like the form factor. There's a couple quirks with the screen and some apps/games but I can work around those. The real thing that keeps me from using it more is the heat/fan noise.

I can't use it anywhere quiet because of the whizzing sound it generates even just at idle, let alone when I do something. With games on the go it's not a problem, but any kind of productivity work like editing code isn't possible.

I saw there were some mods for cooling but I don't believe they're available anymore. Best I've been able to do is under-volt it to lower CPU performance, but that only gets me so far. I'm open to suggestions, though!

The pro1x from fxtec with lineageos plus termux is useful :-)

Looks nice, can't see pricing though. Their website https://www.fxtec.com/smartphones/pro1x shows "available March 2023" for me.

It has some issues, and no Android, pure GNU/Linux, but there's the pinephone and it's keyboard addon.

https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pinephone-pro-keyboard-...

But I think it's more a phone to thinker with, not a Just Works phone.

> What has vanished, is our ability to do general-purpose computing at ~8MHz.

ahem https://xkcd.com/768/

I know there's XKCD for everything but I wonder if there should be.

Considering how "on the nose" this one is, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

No. I bet you could make a slightly better one and increase diversity in the online humor world.

https://xkcd.com/927/

It's in the name of efficiency. Instead of repeating the same conversation about, say, standards, you can just say 927 (which is 900, Yoda's age, plus 27 which is memorable because of the 27-club. Or also 3 squared = 9 and 3 cubed = 27), and everyone will know what you're talking about and you can skip that bit of conversation.

And in small memory. I once had to prepare a church address list on a Psion 3 or 3a with 256kB of memory. That was total memory, used for both execution and battery backed RAM disk. I entered the addresses in to a database, exported to a spreadsheet for sorting and putting the columns in the right order, then exported to word processor document for formatting, and printed over IRDA. No third party sw required. And the thing was so stable even with third party sw that it was quite likely that it was never rebooted before it was replaced years later.

This is why I use previous generation Raspberry Pis and low end SBCs like OrangePi Zeros. Doing things in a constrained environment is fun and rewarding. Being able to run a full-fledged server with 512MB or less RAM is a great exercise and very enlightening to see what's possible.

When one can able to run code on these systems fast, it runs fast everywhere. Running with razor thin free space makes you prevent all memory leaks, and reduce temporary variables to save that space.

Doing great things with today's hardware is still possible, but laziness, "We needed this yesterday, I don't care about its efficiency, hardware is cheap anyway" mindset is killing things fast.

> Doing great things with today's hardware is still possible, but laziness, "We needed this yesterday, I don't care about its efficiency, hardware is cheap anyway" mindset is killing things fast.

It is, but realistically features will increase business long before efficiency starts to hamper it.

"let's MAKE MONEY now, fuck the energy we waste and the planet we kill, goddammit"

No, no. It’s not money. It’s value. Value for our customers, our employees, and most importantly, our shareholders.

Moot point when computing is incredibly efficient when compared to heavy industry.

Actually a very valid point when computing is incredibly hypocritical about their footprint when compared to heavy industry.

Well, considering the power consumption of the data centers and the heat they generate, I wouldn't call that "incredibly efficient".

Yes, a processor runs on ~1.5V, but that small post stamps generate incredible amounts of heat for what they do.

I can stand behind a rack of them to warm myself during prolonged work in our data center.

I keep wanting to fiddle with kubernetes on rPi class hardware. Even the minimalist versions want half a gigabyte per node. Admin software does not need half a gigabyte of memory.

If you want a kubernetes cluster to experiment, then k3s runs just fine on raspberry pi 4 hardware

It still wants half a gig on the nodes. They all want 500+MB

ZX-Spectrum clone (8 bit, 4 Mhz CPU) running Art Studio (an early Paint) loaded from floppy drive: https://imgur.com/a/VcaBnmP

So sort of, but let's not look at the past too wistfully. I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book). I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display. Farther back I remember not having the spare cash for the expansion card necessary to have lower case letters and typing in program listings out of books because that's how some software was distributed (Apple II). Our current generation of PCs is probably within a factor of two of the minimum spec necessary for robust machine translation and natural language interfaces. I enjoy using the old hardware but it really doesn't do most of the jobs we have now.

In every example you listed the limiting factor is memory or storage size, not computing speed.

> I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display.

What changed?

Modern Windows still requires language packs, but you can apparently switch your primary language without a reinstall.

Adobe products still corrupt already-correct Arabic text unless you have the correct edition or add-on or something.

It was indeed annoying to transfer files at least until the Internet and flash drives were widely available, but that’s been more than 20 years.

These limits of old hardware are exactly what makes the software so amazing.

Look what was achieved despite those limits. We've basically had the same desktop and productivity software for 30 years. Look at games like Doom or Tyrian, or what was happening on consoles and think about how crappy that hardware was.

Modern software is embarrassingly slow by comparison. I've been around long enough to know that's always been the way. Newer software drives new hardware sales and we're on yesteryear's supercomputers but why?

> Look what was achieved despite those limits. We've basically had the same desktop and productivity software for 30 years. Look at games like Doom or Tyrian, or what was happening on consoles and think about how crappy that hardware was.

I agree with the rest, but games are a comparatively bad example, almost a counterexample. A lot of them are basically the exception of what you're saying. Because the visual fidelity of games has overall steadily improved since the inception of computer games, with some astonishing milestones along the way.

So games are a category of software that did (and continues to do) make efficient use of ever-improving computer hardware. Not all of them, not in every aspect, but the overall progress is obvious.

Office software on the other hand...

Compared to productivity software, sure, but cycle-for-cycle, the 90s gaming was driven by developers like John Carmack and spiritual forebears who didn't just have to invent their gameplay metaphors, they had to find ways to trick hardware into doing things faster (a lot of mathematical shortcuts, but also working in the terms the hardware worked).

Again, I agree that gaming has come further, but I actually think the comparison works well because gaming is reaching that Windows 2k/XP plateau. We're waist-deep into diminishing returns now. Cyberpunk is the Windows Vista of gamedev. Gosh it's pretty at times but at an almighty cost, we're shovelling gold into our PCs to make generic compute modules work out how light interacts with virtual surfaces. Doesn't sound like gaming to me.

The software continues to get flabbier, demands more and more, and we have to keep up of we can't load Office in under 10 seconds, or play games at the native resolutions. It just feels wasteful.

> Compared to productivity software, sure, but cycle-for-cycle, [...] they had to find ways to trick

That's true, but I think the idea was more that other software has not only been mostly stagnant (that, too), but often actually regressing in performance. Games on the other hand have been steadily improving. Maybe not keeping up the full pace, as the mathematical and hardware tricks became unnecessary and were traded in for ease of development, but game developers at least overall did make use of the better hardware. They stopped doing the super clever stuff when it was just not necessary anymore while still providing better fidelity.

> Doesn't sound like gaming to me.

Eh, it's part of it. And it's not like other aspects did not profit from the better hardware as well. Later Civilization titles are pretty compute-intensive between turns, for more complex gameplay. Earlier chess programs had to "think" a very long time for not that great chess performance...

> So sort of, but let's not look at the past too wistfully.

why?

> I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book).

2MB is 2 million bytes, The average book is something like 0.5

> I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display.

This is a bad thing?

> Farther back I remember not having the spare cash for...

lol, irrelevant!

> Our current generation of PCs is probably within a factor of two of the minimum spec necessary for robust machine translation and natural language interfaces.

I have no idea what you just said. People for the most part read/write text and watch videos. This would work much better if we eliminated compute entirely.

> I enjoy using the old hardware but it really doesn't do most of the jobs we have now.

imho the way to look at old hardware is to look at only the good features we've lost. For example, I cant think of anything I want from a c64 except from sprite collision and having menu entries starting with function keys [F1] because that worked so insanely fast compared to a mouse. The rest was just coping with the state of the art.

The person you're replying to was talking about the Apple II era, when floppies held less than 200k at best. Availability of 2.44 MB floppy drives was an extremely late development, and IIRC rare to actually find in the wild.

Extremely rare. I never encountered one, and I had a lot of niche stuff in the 90s.

1.44MB was the effective capacity of floppies until they died out. There was stuff like VGACopy that could format them with higher capacity (since floppy controller access was fairly low level), but it was an uncommon thing among tinkerers, the disks themselves were not marketed for more than 1.44MB, and I doubt they were tested above their nominal capacity (and even at that they were not exactly known as super reliably).

There never was a 2.44MB disk. You're muddling up 1.44MB (which were really 1.4MB) and 2.88MB.

I remember using a mechanical keyboard, imagine having to replace the paper every page with your hands! If one was to argue that is a significant hurdle in writing a book I would also have a hard time containing my cynicism.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Sholes-G...

What a marvel of engineering. All I got is plastic boxes. Thinking about it I'm not sure if having the next paragraph written by a different person is actually a good idea. Organizing your notes into a book undisturbed by better men is sure to impress a lot more. I would hope the final draft of my book about antique hardware wouldn't quote someone who remembers the bad parts better than the good.

Sure, but to that note, we've been at "enough computer" for a vast array of tasks for a long, long time now.

Obviously, things that move boatloads of bits (mostly media) have well benefited from the vast amounts of RAM and incredible bandwidth of modern machines. And, of course, video games, which will always push limits.

But outside of that, word processing, data collecting, "printing checks from AP", those peaked a long time ago. And, of course, I appreciate how businesses collect vast amounts of data today (because they can, because storage is free), but core business functions, transaction processing, that's pretty well plateaued as well.

I don't think this is very true. Let's take word processing for example, with say Word 5.1 on a Quadra 700 as a highish end (probably $10k in today's dollars) setup available in around 1992: In a narrow sense typing US English on a keyboard and being able to print it was fairly well solved. It would feel slow to someone with today's machines but it wasn't that bad. On the other hand if you shared with someone else in the early 90s odds are it was by handing off a floppy disk. Did you remember to include the necessary fonts? Oh wait, does the other end have a new enough version of PostScript installed? Does it all fit on one disk? Most languages in the world either required a different OS install or were fully unsupported.

Today all of this stuff is pretty well resolved, but at a cost. Easy sharing and interactive collaboration over network is built on protocols like TLS that would be very slow even on the Quadra. The networks that runs over use an amount of compute that rivals supercomputers of the 90s (for one example just look at channel correction in MIMO radios). The disk footprint of all the fonts, languages, etc, is mitigated by storing them server-side, but this is all usable due to how fast networks are now. Machine translation means you can work across a language divide. Dictation is a win for accessibility and avoiding RSI. All of this is available on a Chromebook or iPad that is more reliable than the Quadra, runs on a battery, and is 50x cheaper.

We're not done, just as today spell check and grammar check are widely accepted as table stakes in another ten years features like built-in writing coach, editing, and research assistant features will likely be considered basic requirements with all the hardware needed to support that.

And that's just word processing.

FWIW, I ran across the splitting-text-into-files problem on Android using one of the highly-recommended note-taking apps.

Discovering Termux and having a large suite of Linux terminal-based tools available resolved that and many, many, many more frustrations.

On a positive note, HN is one of the very few sites left which is still simple enough to be used with older browsers. I am writing this comment in the text console (no X11) of a Raspberry Pi 3 with a braille display (no monitor connected) as the output device. Using lynx as a pretty reliable browser. It is the exception, I know, I am a freak by nature of my disability, but I am also proud to know this niche still exists and it is actually possible to do some interesting things online with very little resources.

It’s annoying because so much content SHOULd be perfectly accessible as described, but frameworks and browsers just fight it at every step.

Too bad Apache didn’t have a Gopher server built in by default.

That surprises me.

I'm a webdev and I've long considered HN to be a bit of an atrocity in terms of markup and a11y. Nested tables, no sr text to explain the thread structure, JS-only links scattered around. It works but only by the mercy of many text-based browsers being started in the 90s, so they're used to this pre-semantics rubbish.

I can't tell if it's hubris but if I were king for a day, I'd like to think I'd leave HN in a better state. At the very least, I'd clean up the cruft.

Wow, I never knew HN layout was using tables. That was surprising, all this years and I never checked.

HN loads large amounts of comments really quickly on my phone's browser and there's no jank or lag when navigating it, and no popups. I love it, especially compared to the pain of using Reddit's mobile site for similar comment-browsing tasks

The table layout on the main page is more of a problem for a modern web bgrowser then it is actually for Lynx. Modern browsers will announce the table, and your position in it, which is totally irrelevant on the main page. That is definitely the wrong semantic tag for the job at hand. It should be a ordered-list, because that is what it is. However, most markup things tends to get rendered quite nicely in Lynx. The only thing I notice which I somethimes wish would work differently is the lack of the ability to know who is replying to whom...