Oh, but that's why you went to the computer lab of your uni - those machines were on a 10mbit LAN and had a decent connection to the internet!
Although you still wouldn't download a CD, simply because... you wouldn't have been able to take it home with you! Hard drives were in many cases smaller than a single CD. Anything more than a few 10s of MBs would have been considered excessive.
Connecting to office LANs and going on the internet was a magical feeling back then. The speed coming from a 56k dialup was jarring. We'd have network games of Quake (rocket jumps included) and watch Real Player versions of grainy South Park early episodes at er, lunch. Good times.
More than the raw speed was the fact that the error checking, buffering, and compression on dialup added anywhere from 150-400ms to your ping RTT. You could disable a lot of it, but results could be mixed depending on the quality of your lines.
Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to say that Visual Studio had a resource editor UI, basically a frontend to a resource file - that's it.
In contrast, Delphi provided you all the UI code by default, so even if you did not write a single line of code, your program ran and displayed a window or dialog with all the UI elements you could interact with. This was a higher level abstraction (one could argue VS did not even have an abstraction - you still had to code your window procedure from scratch. MFC was the first real attempt at simplifying UI code, but you still had to write code...).
But it did not stop here: it was trivially easy to add a database "connection" to your app (IIRC it was represented by a UI element that was not actually displayed), just provide the connection parameters, connect it to a complex UI element like a table, and voila - you had a live database view within 5 minutes.
Yeah, a lot of non-visual components still require (or want) you to drag-and-drop them in the builder and edit many or most properties there. It's a weird thing to adjust to, and it often leads to a very cluttered view if you have a lot of them. Conversely, a cluttered view with a ton of non-visual components can be a very easy-to-spot signal that you might be trying to do too much in one screen.
Not only has MFC never been at the same level as OWL, unfortunately to this day other than the short lived C++/CX, they never shipped anything comparable to C++ Builder, which shares the RAD tooling with Delphi.
Even doing COM in Delphi/C++ Builder feels more ergonomic than any of Microsoft endless C++ frameworks for COM/WinRT.
The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992.
Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.
And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.
In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.
In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.
I think the Gravis Ultrasound is in the same category as the Apple IIGS sound card, which came out in 1986. And I put the Apple IIGS sound card much further ahead than the Amiga Paula.
The IIgs had the Ensoniq DOC (ES5503): 32 oscillators allowing for ~16 stereo voices at the same time. But it only had 64K of sound RAM.
The GUS (that kickstarted alsa on linux) is based on the DOC II (ES5504), which is more or less a 16-bit version of the DOC that could address 1MB of sound sample RAM.
VCF East: The Story of Ensoniq – Al Charpentier, Bill Mauchly, Joe Friel: When Bruce Crockett, Bob Yannes, Charles Winterble and Albert Charpentier left Commodore in late 1982, they named the company Peripheral Visions.
Listen as Albert & Bill will tell their tangled story of how they become Ensoniq.
At least in the finance world, there are still a million small processes driven by an Excel spreadsheet put together in an afternoon by an intern 20 years ago. If it is a really business critical process, then the input is usually a csv file, read by an Excel macro.
Because Excel is user friendly, and "is good enough". Mostly...
I drive a 2019 Passat, with lane assist, tempomat, road sign detection etc - it only beeps when there is no more washer fluid (but then it does beep every fcking 5 minutes - easily the most annoying feature of this car).
> The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage.
It's not necessarily about "advantage", especially on longer journeys. What if there is a crash on the Autobahn 1 hour in front of me? Even if I don't reroute, I at least have a choice of planning my toilet and lunch stop _before_ the crash site.
It is also possible to plan a different route if the crash is visible so far ahead. There are usually multiple routes I could take, and I decide based on the traffic and other factors, where I go. It can depend on the time of day, the time of year, etc. Maybe usually I don't take the one which is 100kms longer, but in the case of a crash, or even just heavy traffic it could be quicker still.
So for any non-trivial journey, I always use navigation, even if I could drive to the other place blindly. It's not really about navigation, it is about the current situation on the roads.
My employer just finalized a contract with Anthropic, for enterprise Claude Code use. Which means that unless there is a _major_ downgrade in service quality, we are now locked in for the next few years (but at least for a year, although vendor contracts are renegotiated less frequently).
Just checked the dashboard, and we seem to have the exact same $200 credit as others, enterprise or not. Token inflation affects us just like everyone else.
It feels a bit like buying the same box of chocolates every day, but the size / weight of the box is shrinking... the price remains unchanged!
This is highly parasitic: someone does a Show HN about their hobby project, and then you come and snap on to it like a leech with your to-be-paid-for completely unrelated game demo.
I find this kind of behaviour disgusting. Why don't you do a Show HN on your own?
"Chess-related roguelike" is a an very crowded genre for unclear reasons and it's difficult to stick out.
So far I've played Shotgun Queen and Pawnbarian. There's also Ouroboros King, Demoncrawl, The Rookery, Passant, Chess Survivors, Gambonanza, Mind over Monarchy, and many more.
I've not played as many (games in said genre) as you, jjmarr. And so, if you don't mind indulging me... I've an idea for a game that perhaps you'd be able to tell me if it's something you've already seen in play.
The mechanic is fairly simple for this board game (not computer/video):
A standard chessboard and chess pieces are used, with a custom deck of cards for each player. Before moving any pieces, a card is revealed that effects enhancements/restrictions/story/etc. The selling point would be banking on the creativity of the deck, of course.
If there is anybody that could run with this idea (if in fact original, which I doubt) before I do, I'd love to hear about it! ♟
In this sense, Java is already the next Cobol. I usually ask one or two questions about class loading in interviews (of senior Java devs), the younger ones are frequently stumbling upon these, and they don't even understand why I'm asking this. Good old Tomcat days, when you could run out of PermGenSpace if you weren't careful :)
Good news is, Oracle extended extended extended support for Java 8 will not last forever, and eventually - if you work in a regulated industry - the company WILL have to pull the trigger.
On the other hand, "where there is muck, there is brass", so a little bit of legacy can be beneficial for some.
Although you still wouldn't download a CD, simply because... you wouldn't have been able to take it home with you! Hard drives were in many cases smaller than a single CD. Anything more than a few 10s of MBs would have been considered excessive.