What features of old computers helped you learn to be a better programmer?

Posted by David Cary on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by David Cary
Published on 2011-03-20T05:31:14Z Indexed on 2011/03/20 8:16 UTC
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What features of old computers helped you learn to be a better programmer -- but don't seem to be available on new computers?

I imagine that, while educational, you are really glad some features are gone, such as

programs ran so slowly that I could almost see each pixel being plotted, so I got a visceral feel for the effect of various optimizations.

I imagine other features you may be a little nostalgic for, such as

I could turn on the computer, and write a short program that printed "Hello, World" on the printer, before ever "booting" a "disk".

(I'm hoping that this is constructive enough to avoid the fate of the " What have we lost from computers 20 years ago ?" question).

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