[TUHS] cat -v and other complaints

[Andy Kosela]

On Tuesday, September 4, 2018, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Sep 3, 2018 at 11:11 PM Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> That was one of the main reasons I disliked Plan9.  It embraced the
>> "windows interface" trend of the mid 80s.
>>
>>
>>
> well, you can believe that, and I can't stop you, but it's wrong.
>

Can you elaborate more on your point of view?

There has been a slow shift in the way we use computer interfaces and the
start of the "windows computing" revolution certainly happened around mid
80s with companies like Apple, Microsoft or Commodore developing their own
version of GUI (which goes back to Xerox PARC of course).  Unix received X
Window System from MIT in 1984.

At the time people thought that GUI is the best and most useful interface
for the new era and text terminal computing is about to die pretty soon.
Well it took at least 10 more years to happen and the introduction of World
Wide Web and Windows 95 certainly help solidify it.

When Plan 9 was created in the mid-late 80s exactly those ideas
circulated.  Nothing comes from nothing, everything has its historical
context.  In the late 80s in order to "innovate" it was natural to think
that abandoning text terminals is a "progress".

Unix was born in the different era.  Same with the original IBM PC.  That
is why they revolve around pure text interface.  I'm just glad that text
mode survived and it is still available even on modern PC's.  But most kids
these days don't even know what it is...  They have GUIs everywhere, from
their smartphones to their laptops.

It is a very sad state of things when people more and more abandon text
computing for the image based computing.  I agree with Kurt that we are
already in the Information Technology ice age.

General purpose pure text based computing is slowly becoming just a retro
hobby.

--Andy
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