TimeSquirrel

I stopped using it regularly several years ago, then I come back to help someone install it and it took me more time than I want to admit to figure out how to make a local account that wasn’t attached to a Microsoft cloud account.

No, you’re supposed to smoke it, not fuck it.

Option three: YOLO it and be the first to come up with a working config for it after ripping your hair out for weeks.

And then never tell the rest of the Internet…

C and assembly programmers: first time?

Behind the pretty UIs, computers and tablets are still computers, with CPUs running machine code residing in memory. Nothing has fundamentally changed since the 60s. Somebody has to continue to understand how it all works behind the scenes to move us forward, or we’ll have the movie “Idiocracy” coming true, and we’ll all stagnate as a species while an AI tries its best to manage us and keep us alive.

In your analogy, it would be as if we’re all still using mechanical typewriters, but have created an automaton with a pretty face to talk to which pushes the keys and changes the ribbon behind a curtain. The typewriter is still there.

Right, and cars got pushbutton ignition, backup cameras, lane sensors, and front end collision warnings. That doesn’t mean people should stop learning how to change a tire. I blame schools for not keeping kids technologically literate in a world where computers run our entire lives.

Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS and had to edit their autoexec.bat files to install a TSR? Why is it such a big deal now but somehow everybody was okay with it 30 years ago? It won’t kill people to learn a bit about how their computer works.

It’s like owning a car but not even knowing where the windshield wiper fluid goes. And that’s becoming a thing too, sadly. Might as well lock the hood and only let the dealer in, that seems to be what people want nowadays.

trying to catch some squirrels for my dinner.

Excuse me? 🤨

Starts handing out the complementary cat ears, miniskirt, and programming socks to incoming Windoze users.

Imagine your oven or clothes iron turning itself on while you’re not home. Why TF people just accept their computers doing this is beyond me. Either it’s a boiling frog situation, or people simply don’t remember the times us users had complete control over our devices and think things were always this way.

As an 80s/90s kid, I can tell you they most definitely were not.

Well…yes?

Like living in a house constantly undergoing a remodel. Sometimes the plumber is going to accidently route the toilet drain pipe to the shower head before the inspector gets there to check it.

It’s definitely a Mac. I remember that case from middle school. Apple computers were huge in education in the 80s/90s. It was their staple cash cow back then before Jobs came back and they started chasing Starbucks-guzzling hipsters.

Yep. If you want a real computer instead of a cheap-ass disposable office machine, be prepared to spend quite a bit of money. That was a fact 20 years ago and is still true now. We had crappy sub-$500 E-machines and Gateway PCs in those days too.

I’m a millennial but I didn’t own my own PC until I was like 21 (even then, half the parts in it were handmedowns from my Dad). I would have never been able to afford a laptop of the time. Computers are an expensive purchase all at once. Phones come with subsidized plans. That’s probably why you see a lot more bias towards them.

There are only three. Debian-based, Redhat/Fedora-based, and then the rest nobody cares about…

No. Where’s the guy wearing furry ears, tail, and programming socks?

MacOS is actually officially “UNIX” though. It has that going for it.

I don’t know, I have a pet programming project of my own I’ve been messing around with on and off for a year, but you know what? I get it. It starts with a single, simple goal. Every project can become a TempleOS if you let it.