I distinctly remember when the local library started phasing in web-based terminals to replace text-based card catalog terminals. Early 2000s, it must have been? Slow as molasses, hard on the eyes, (Remember when every dang institutional CRT would be set to a flickery 60hz, with no way to fix it?) gummy rubber-dome keyboards on Wintel machines, but by god it was web-based, which was the Future. (Oh how right they were...) Anyone with a web browser at home could visit it, without having to bust out telnet!
I stuck with the amber screen terminals, whose commands I had long-since memorized, but their numbers steadily dwindled, dwindled, until there was one left, then none. Forced into the arms of an IE6-era old school form-based web app, no shortcuts, no nothing. The data was all still text, they wouldn't have cover photos for years. Alas.
There are so many things like this that I worry, will be lost in the oblivion of time, and erased forever. I think cliche of romanticizing old ways of doing things is totally uncalled for. People don't romanticize about bad things from the old days. They pick the best ones that survived memories and thus talk about it to provide guidance for the future. We should listen to them.
I wish I'd paid more attention to the details of how things were back then, to the glowing amber VT220s and Laser 128s. It didn't seem important... why would the future be worse, not better? And yet, somehow we're here....
I stuck with the amber screen terminals, whose commands I had long-since memorized, but their numbers steadily dwindled, dwindled, until there was one left, then none. Forced into the arms of an IE6-era old school form-based web app, no shortcuts, no nothing. The data was all still text, they wouldn't have cover photos for years. Alas.