Gratitude Day 16: Retrocomputing

This morning, I came across an article which the official Hackaday fediverse account linked yesterday: "Rosy Retrocomputing." And... no hate. Albert has a good point. As much as I enjoy the rosy-colored glasses myself, there are some real pain points to retrocomputing, or as we called it when I was growing up, "computing." 😄 If you don't believe me, download the original Commodore VIC-20 manual here and pop open the VICE emulator in VIC-20 mode in another window (or run this lightweight emulator in a browser window (source here)). Pretend that this is your only computer, and go through the manual, writing your own software in BASIC. It's a wonderful experience in a lot of ways, and... pretty flipping terrible in many, many others. 😆 (80-column mode? What's that?!? the VIC20 has twenty-two!!! 🤣 But the beauty of retrocomputing isn't how wonderful MS-BASIC was (it was horrible), how much we enjoyed using line numbers (we didn't), or how stable Operating Systems were before memory…