Right. Something about hardware and OS staying stable long enough so that people could focus on creating new interesting software -- instead of just trying to keep up with ever changing APIs and constantly searching StackOverflow for ready made solutions.
Sometimes severe constraints drive the really beautiful solutions.
Don't forget documentation. Sure, you couldn't look stuff up on StackOverflow, but there was actual, real, paper documentation you could read, and it was usually well-written and really useful. Try finding that these days, even in digital form. (Personally, I'll vote for the Qt documentation, but that's about all I've seen that's really that great.)
People may say it's just nostalgia but I think what I loved most was the competition and variety. It was like living in a golden age of home computing. You had the Amiga, Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64, all these sorts of incompatible home computing systems. And I think being incompatible was kind of a benefit for home computing culture. Because this spawned multiple magazines and communities that could survive because they could target various systems, rather than more consolidated cultures that have happened since the IBM PC days, where you end up with just a few big web sites no one can compete with. I miss that diversity, and also hacker spirit compared to today when building systems is often much like using big pre-built Lego blocks.
We need to give a new Internet traction just to relive this, haha... Use the opportunity to fix DNS and decentralize it while at it. :p Then get Haiku OS or something going...
