Re: terminal only for two weeks

Retrograde <fungus@amongus.com.invalid> writes:

Doing everything from the terminal just isn’t viable for me, mostly because I
didn’t grow up with it.

I guess I was lucky, I was exposed to a bewildering variety of computers
as I grew up in the 80s. There was the myriad of home computers, a lot
of Commodores and Speccys but also Sharps and MSXs and whatever. Some
CP/M machines at school, there were also some early Windows PCs there,
then the GUIs like Atari ST and Amiga's Workbench, sometimes Macs.

90s, I went to the University. They had MS-DOS PCs and text terminals
connected to Unix machines. Some Sun and HP Unix workstations too but
those were for more advanced students only for which I got access
later. Funny contrast, in '91 I got a summer job in a university
department which was all Macs. Looking back, it seems so radical that I
had dual displays and a "huge" 17" monitor to work on way back
then. Even if the other display was the minimal one integrated to the
boxy Mac.

In the meantime, my home computing went from a Commodore 64 to MS-DOS
PC, then dual booting that with OS/2 and some Linux experiments. Games
went to Windows so that MS-DOS became Windows 98 and XP and 7 and
10. Late 90s Linux experiments became permanent when I learned of Debian
Stable. OS/2 disappeared when picking supported hardware for it got too
tiresome.

Work, started mid-90s with Sun Unix workstations until I was kicked to
Office land. That was an awful time and when I escaped, it's been much
the same, Windows PC on the desk, Unix and later Linux server
somewhere. Oh, one job actually provided a Linux workstation under the
desk in addition to a Windows laptop but that was one time.

But to the topic, text only in 2024? I don't think so. Web browsing and
email, just no. Sure I just used Lynx on a Linux server at work to check
the proxy settings are correct and I do use mutt to teach misses to my
spam filter but that's pretty much it. For me, the email I get is HTML
with pictures from commercial sources. Very little personal
correspondence over email these days and mailing lists I get via NNTP
and gmane.