Good idea -- I've not loaded images since...ever, I still prefer the text/plain part. Like an idiot I assumed they were getting an error message from the MTA. But then what if they deliver but I never open?
If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers. When/if you later learn to use a desktop, it being like a smartphone makes it familiar.
Sucks for us geezers that learned things the other way around though!
People seem to forget that "smartphones" (in the post-iPhone sense) are barely old enough to drive. The first iPhone came out in 2007, android doesn't drop till the following year, and the first iPad doesn't come out till 2010.
If you were a kid with a video-playing smartphone before about 2012, your parents were pretty damn well off, and likely early adopters too
I don't think that helps support the argument, though. Despite using a stylus-driven touchscreen, the Palm Pilot UI had a lot more in common with the desktop UIs of the 90s than with today's smartphone UIs or even today's smartphone-tainted desktop UIs.
Palm pilots had ui/ux more closely resembling today’s smart phones than you think. The swiping keyboards, for example, more closely resemble the script used for fast typing on a palm pilot. The ui was meant for touch, not for precision. At least the games didn’t have ads back then.
Today's swiping keyboards are nothing like the original Graffiti or Graffiti 2. Those used shapes/gestures derived from the actual letter shapes, while the swiping gestures supported by the on-screen keyboards of today rely on gestures derived from the QWERTY layout of the on-screen keyboard. Because both were simplifications of the completely different input methods they were emulating: pen vs keyboard.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Palm Pilot UI (all the parts that were actually on the screen instead of below it in the dedicated writing area) looks thoroughly 90s: the basic buttons, drop-down boxes, tabs and dialog box layouts, scrollbars that aren't trying to hide from you. The main UI elements missing from the Palm Pilot that were present in eg. 90s Mac OS or Windows are the free form desktop layout (instead of the smartphone-like app launcher grid), and the persistent on-screen menu bar or taskbar.
The Palm Pilot UI was unquestionably designed around the assumption of higher precision than today's touch-oriented UIs. The stylus was not considered optional. The lack of capacitive touch sensing for gesture recognition meant the UI was much more reliant on precise button taps where today's smartphones would use swipes and other gestures for stuff like scrolling or "back".
Um. Swiping is almost exactly like the gesture letter shapes, except now they are word shapes. Swiping “shape” is always the same gesture on the keyboard, you can learn these gestures and type really fast.
To your second paragraph: of course it looks “throughly 90’s”. It was the 90’s. Did an LLM tell you to say this? I have no idea what scroll bars have to do with anything. I can tell you they were a pain to use. That hasn’t changed.
To your third paragraph: the stylus wasn’t optional. They didn’t just “lack” capacitive screens. It didn’t exist yet at scale. This was what Apple brought to the market. You couldn’t really have them if you wanted them. That being said, I used these interfaces while walking, riding in a car, and sitting still. I never had trouble tapping the right thing because the buttons were huge in the UI.
You do bring up a good point about there not really being swipe gestures to go “back”. I don’t use them today, so I’m not as familiar with that type of behavior other than to say it is really annoying when done by accident, usually while picking up the device.
>If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers
Circa 2004, when 25 year olds would probably be migrated out of diapers, smartphones were palm treos and Sony Ericsson K700s. I don't think they would be great distractions for kids, there certainly wouldn't be any endless Spiderman/Elsa YouTube to lock them in.
More like ~18 and under. The post-2007 zoomers and nearly all alphites are ipad kids, but that drops off dramatically as you get to the older zoomer segment and millennials.
Absolutely, yes. When China's civil war with Chaing Kai-Shek happened, the communists won.
After that, landlords, business owners, and industrial owners were presented with an ultimaturm, of which many took. And that was to return to being a worker, or be jailed.
Given how capitalists amass wealth and options to evade all governments, this does seem like a valid solution.
A modern viewing is after Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba) publicly criticized the monetary policy of China. He lost most of his standing, and the attempt of an IPO for his payments company. Note that he lives and is still CEO, just not as a Influential power in China.
Even the Chinese admit that the anti-science was a wrong choice. So were the witch-hunts for perceived-West-ness.
But it was "has anybody dealt with monied elite". I was pointing out a case in point that there was a situation. And the choice to the elite was "be a worker, or be jailed".
I recently watched Animagraffs' videos on Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. It's interesting that no one has asked, "was anything analogous to that ever done before"? Remember, we're talking about USA here.
Even without using ZFS (I prefer XFS as significantly faster) all the files that I store have content hash values in extended attributes, for data integrity verification (and also for data deduplication).
Whenever I write that drive, after a power cycle (to be sure that the files are read from disks and not from some cache) I run a script that checks the integrity of the files, to be sure that I can remove them from elsewhere without risking data loss.
With SMART-enabled drives, I usually do that only in the rare cases when a drive reports corrected errors, because I have seen cases when a drive miscorrected some errors, resulting in corrupted files. With a HDD without SMART, when the drives finds errors, but it believes to have corrected them successfully, there is no external sign that something could have gone wrong.
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