Everyone stopped using xrdb more than twenty years ago, same things for drawing primitives.
I understand the wish some seems to have for things to never change. It's probably very comforting but things have to move with their time or they will be left behind.
I always enjoy these absolute "X tech is dead long live tech Y".
Note that earlier the top story on HN was about MSPaint and the top comment said:
> "All the comments that "you can just use X to do Y" is missing the point that Paint just works"
REST still (and will continue to) just work for most people, I'm sure some will switch or some will go straight to GraphQL, but lets not just go ahead and declare the whole thing dead. Haha.
ugh, I feel for you, 16x16 sprites look really cool no matter how far in the future we go. FWIW I've lost all my old work too. I wish Dropbox was around back then.
Shhh. The nostalgia already did that. You didn't need to say it, too!
I still really like some of the design trends back then. I think a lot of it was because they only had to work on desktop.
I also like those old isometric pixel drawings that were so popular. It was fun to play with as a kid because you could pretty easily follow along with paint, albeit with a lot lower quality.
The old school part of me who had to use gnuplot with tek40xx emulation because that's all we had for graphics kinda loves seeing this. Then the 2014 me is thinking/shouting "Why? Working with graphics terminals really sucked back then."
same. it's hard to describe how 10-year-old me felt about 8bit dithered graphics sparkling through phosphorus but 30 years later the magic is gone. I can't point to any one thing (maybe the advent of webapps) but it has something to do with software just generally becoming more and more sucky.
I wonder if that's the reason that Corel acquired Xara back in the nineties?
I discovered the program around 1995, after Corel acquired them. I figured it would be a 'cheap' version of Corel Draw. Instead, it was quite a bit better! Particularly for the time, there was nothing faster that I was aware of. (In 1995 memory was prohibitively expensive, and Xara was very efficient.)
I still use it to this day, though the software reverted back to it's original owner long ago.
Along the way I've learned a lot of new tricks, but my core practices are largely similar to what they've always been. I struggle to think of any other tool or skill that's changed less over that length of time - for me, the new useful bits are largely codifying and refining old manual processes.
Well, the "codifying and refining old manual processes" is what software like Photoshop is all about. Where do you draw the line?
A lot of stuff introduced AFTER version 5 is used everyday by almost anyone. In fact, Layer Styles (version 6) is the number one requested feature for Pixelmator.
Other stuff:
fully vector text, camera RAW (7),
Shadow/Highlight, Match Color, Lens Blur, Hierarchical layer groups, 16 bit per channel, support for files over 2 Gigabytes, type on a path (8),
Smart Objects, Smart Sharpen (9),
Smart (non-destructive) Filters (10)
And other stuff, maybe not visible, but that we couldn't live without AT ALL, like Intel Mac support, and 64-bit support, plus the "how did we work before" GPU support, all introduced in later versions than 10.
It's amazing to see how little the concepts have changed in desktop world since Xerox Alto. The only different concept I saw few years back was by 10gui http://10gui.com/ with VR, MR, and AR coming in we need such innovation again.
TheDraw was one of the few pieces of 1990s shareware i purchased, and i have fond memories of it, but i feel compelled to ask: what use is that sort of thing nowadays? Back then we used them to make animations for dial-up BBSes, but the internet has long since obsoleted that. :-?
I know of one industry that is STILL using Dpaint to create graphics and animations for a certain type of dot-matrix display. It's crude, but nothing works as well. Also, they have a bunch of tools to read the LBM format and nobody is available to upgrade to newer stuff.
The middle two and bottom right of the first pic make no sense to me. I don't get this nostalgia. One of my first C projects was a failed attempt at using opengl to do a 3d desktop environment. Still frustrated at how archaic the desktop and webui is. The future is held hostage by the past.
We've come a long way from the time that the HP technical support person asked Steve Strassmann "Why would you ever need to point to something that you've drawn in 3D?"
I miss how difficult it is to get into graphics programming nowadays. DirectX and OpenGL have somewhat high learning curves for new programmers (especially kids). Even the "simplified" graphics libraries are usually OOPified and take some learning.
> Graphics Interchange Format... was dropped from every usage all over the net in the blink of an eye and replaced by a fresh-new format named Portable Network Graphics.
If by "in the blink of an eye" they mean "over the course of about a decade, gradually, and with hanging-on remnants even today"....
I understand the wish some seems to have for things to never change. It's probably very comforting but things have to move with their time or they will be left behind.
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