Ward's Wiki is wonderful. It totally reminds me of the old days, when a website was nothing more than a collection of hypertext links.
The original rant really does make a good point about how accessible things once were. Gosh even being 24 I remember the days of screwing around with logo and qbasic and hacking serial ports with zterm. It's not that everything 'just worked' then (It didn't) but that if it didn't work you could still get something useful out of the machine. The layers of abstraction from the hardware have grown so much now that nothing makes sense.
The original rant really does make a good point about how accessible things once were. Gosh even being 24 I remember the days of screwing around with logo and qbasic and hacking serial ports with zterm. It's not that everything 'just worked' then (It didn't) but that if it didn't work you could still get something useful out of the machine. The layers of abstraction from the hardware have grown so much now that nothing makes sense.