Yes, absolutely. One of the first things I noticed when I changed from two pairs of glasses to progressive lenses. The other thing was that, because I don't have to switch glasses to look away from the screen, I remember to focus on a distant object every so often.
Yes, same here. I have this setup replicated and do demos for people whenever there is interest. It's the strongest connection I have to the arcane old ways of computing as I came after punch cards and paper tape.
My earliest memory of anything computer programming is from the early 80s, when a snow day had the two neighbor kids, whose parents were teachers in another district, over to our house with their TI-99/4a. The oldest showed me the entry and running of the sample program Mr. Bojangles. I was enthralled.
A few years later I had one of my own, though at that point it was very long in the tooth. But I still learned its limits, playing (yes) Hunt the Wumpus, Tombstone City, and others, programming, and doing things like composing the Jeopardy! theme song in BASIC.
I have one of these again, with the stuff I had as a kid, and more (like the voice synth) and it's so limited even for the era, but still iconic.
> I have one of these again, with the stuff I had as a kid, and more (like the voice synth) and it's so limited even for the era, but still iconic.
Growing up I had a retired uncle who'd collected and restored a few classic cars of the 1950s to cherry condition. He kept them in a separate four car garage out back where he'd work on them in his spare time and then take them out for a drive on Sundays. Being a nerd kid, I couldn't really relate. Those old cars couldn't go very fast, weren't very comfortable and didn't have important features like an 8-track tape player (oh, and seat belts). Even the radio was only AM! I was more interested in the latest Amiga computer, so my Uncle's deep affection for these old old cars was just a quirky eccentricity.
Starting in the late 90s I gradually began acquiring classic 8 and 16-bit home computers of the 1980s when I'd hear of someone throwing one away. To me, that now-useless trash was still a treasure! At first I just "saved" the ones I'd actually owned but once I had those, I expanding to the models my teenage self had lusted over in Byte Magazine but could never dream of affording. eBay and thrift stores circa 2000 were overflowing with them for $5 or $10.
Once I had all those, I just kept going and picked up every model I'd ever even heard of and then a bunch of foreign ones from Europe, Japan, South America, Eastern Europe and Russia I'd never heard of. And I never paid more than $25 for any of them. They were just so interesting, I couldn't resist. Each platform was a unique evolutionary branch with its own opinionated design choices, operating system and vision of what 'personal' computing might be.
So... now I can finally understand my Uncle's fascination with his weird, old, not-very-good cars. :-)
I kind of do a variant of this sometimes with “pause” in the Xcode debugger. If I’ve just encountered some kind of hang or delay, often hitting that will put me in the right place in the threads/call stack to figure out what I did.
My recollection was the block syntax one being first as well, back when that was added to Objective-C. It was arcane enough to have to look up all the time.
I ran an exhibit of eight machines from my retrocomputing collection last year, including a 1986 Mac Plus with 1MB RAM running Photoshop 1.0. People really enjoyed it! It’s kind of remarkable what you can still do with it and how freeing it is to have singular focus in an app.
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