Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but...
I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000".
Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card, which is what was depicted in the YouTube video. But the computer did have one ISA slot, and an Adlib or Sound Blaster compatible card could have been installed.
It also had a 386 processor rather than the 286 normally found on Tandy 1000 computers, and 1MB of RAM.
VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supported VGA resolution.
The late Lonnie Falk would have been happy to see that PCM did such a good job of covering Radio Shack's computers that it is thought of as Tandy's magazine. Falsoft's line of magazines covering that area probably added at least a few million to Tandy's bottom line.
Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers.
It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option..
You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
> To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option..
Are you talking about the 90s or now? Because those were all at least as true then as now. Everything took forever. You needed more RAM every month. Everything crashed constantly. I had to reinstall Win98SE so many fucking times that I can still type F73WT-WHD3J-CD4VR-2GWKD-T38YD from memory.
The amount of suck in commercial software is constant. Companies always prioritize adding the shiny-looking features that sell software to rubes over improving things like memory use, response time, and general quality of life until the quality of life is actually bad enough to drive customers to another vendor, so it's perpetually bad enough to keep the average customer right on the edge of "oh fuck this, I'm switching to something else."
Software crashed all the time back then. Hitting control-S was one of those things you just did by habit so as to not lose too much work when it happened.
Apps take 10 seconds to load? Which apps, on what system?
My whole machine reboots in less than 10 seconds. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a decade. I haven’t had significant data loss from a failed drive or a corrupt machine in.. I can’t remember. Even DaVinci Resolve is ready to run in a few short seconds.
This is all on a machine I bought 6-8 years ago. I reboot my phone and watch and laptop when I think to, not because I have to. I run half a dozen browsers and hundreds of tabs and play YouTube while waiting for a remote machine to deploy to an immutable temp instance that gets destroyed after every test cycle.
I speak to my AIs and I can live and work anywhere on this planet that legally allows me.
There are problems in our world and on our machines and in our governments but apps don’t take 10 seconds to load.
Notice how everybody replying says "less than 5s".
As if anything done on a machine going through 10_000_000_000 (10 Giga) instructions per seconds should be anything but perceived instantaneous, for it's finite lifetime human user.
On my personal 2017-vintage i5-7200U, GIMP opens in under 5 seconds. On the computer I had for my last job, a 2023-ish i7, about 30 seconds. The problem was the shitheap of corporate security software that bogged down the zillion file access operations during application startup, not the app itself.
>To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped
Part of my job when I was a youngn, was rebooting the Windows NT server running the software router because packets stopped forwarding for the entire net cafe.
I don’t know what period your referencing but software quality wasn’t exactly amazing back in the day. It did mandate a higher degree of validation before release due to the distribution nature (physical media as opposed to a download) but even then some remarkably dumb bugs made it out the door
Your note taking app doesn't need AI, but it also doesn't need OLE, which represented an equally hot buzzword ("software componentry") of the 90s that Microsoft was trying to shoehorn into everything.
Every generation has its hype cycle; it's nothing new.
I had found often not only adding too much bloat and stuff but also often lacks stuff which is actually useful. (I wrote programs the way that I do, in order to try to avoid the problems; it is not perfect but in some ways it helps.)
> It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
Is it? I think there's a common tendency to "stop exploring" cultural artifacts very deeply as we age, but not everyone shares this trait. Some people continue to value novelty in those areas well into old age.
For my part, treasured artifacts of my youth don't impede my ability to appreciate new things. And indeed, I think many videogames I loved dearly have aged poorly.
I don't know. I'm glad I no longer have a tower which makes so much noise with its fads and that big ugly screens from my younger years. I far more prefer my current settings. Well, I didn't have so much noise with my very first computer, an Amstrad 6128, but I don't really miss "run paper" that much either.
And to me the best desktop experience in term of software has been gnome 3 after it had time to hone its jump forward from its previous major release. So, not the newest hot thing out there, but not my first crush.
Regarding forward, augmented reality on glasses seems to have great potentials, but I don't have much hope foe the default systems they will come with. A future where most people wear those stuff filled with signal tailored by the ad industry and whatever governments is just not letting much room escaping the obvious various dystopian scenarios.
I don't think nostalgia is the only factor here. If it were, then no young people would be interested in old computers, which I have found not to be the case.
I seriously doubt nostalgia for old computers correlates to perceptions of U.S. debt.
Having said that, I wasn’t the only person deeply upset when Greenspan gave the green light for Bush’s tax cuts. Under Clinton we were on track to wipe out the debt in another 10 years.
I'm not talking about old computers themselves, but rather something that's mistakenly taken as nostalgia.
Things in the 90s were more straightforward because supply chains and business processes were much shorter and less complex. What people interpret as nostalgia might actually reflect a recognition that systems/products genuinely were more efficient before they became increasingly layered with intermediaries and dependencies.
An illustration of these dependencies and layers is debt - the mounting complexity parallels the mounting debt levels.
Games are now infinitely more complex -- I can run an improved version of Ultima VII (1992) on a device that fits in my pocket, while the original wouldn't have run on this (it required a 486 and even the latest possible Tandy systems maxed out at the 386), and that's not even getting into stuff like Factorio or Satisfactory.
Objectively speaking, computers back in the 90's were not capable of organizing the information that a single human being would be interested in, let alone the information of a community or state or country or the world.
I am happy with the potential that we have available today to do things that we couldn't in the past. And it's always possible to improve software on top of more capable hardware and OSes.
It's funny how you want minimalism yet another commenter commented about an experimental OS needing to have a modern UI to be relevant. Just can't win.
I think business competition has killed the minimality. Because minimality doesn't sell as a quality. Competitor would throw more power and more features into the market. It is not driven by the need for such power or features. Consumer is forced to move to a bloated product as minimal products are removed or made extinct due to incompatible ecosystem.
The first funding round for a startup. "Series A", "Series B", etc.
(… although there are sometimes "seed" rounds that precede a series A, or even pre-seed rounds … like everything else, it's complicated & messy. But hopefully you see the metaphor the parent was trying to paint.)
Because high-speed internet became omnipresent. The act of making a software release stopped having a cost associated with it, like having to print CDs and ship them to stores. Software transitioned from meaningful releases, each of which needed to be as bug-free as possible and had to be sold to users as a genuine meaningful upgrade, to this pathetic eternal beta we now have.
Also because everyone seems too scared to practice adversarial interoperability.
Also because SoCs are now a thing which allows unhackable secure boot and other DRM-like functionality that prevents people from modifying their own devices to act in their own interest, or, as is the case with Android devices, allows it but punishes the user for having gained full access to their own device.
Modern technology has made it a lot easier to build video games or entertainment (music, movies, etc) affordably and in a reasonable amount of time. The diversity of entertainment out there for you to experience cheaply is incredible compared to the 90s or 00s, even if we lost some stuff like Flash along the way.
Nearly 19000 games were released on Steam in 2024. A lot of the most interesting stuff that came out simply wouldn't have existed 10 or 20 years ago. I think it's great that those things can exist now and potentially find an audience.
It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities.
The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and desire.
The same drive for betterment that made our species “kill such beautiful minimalism” was the one that lifted billions out of subsistence farming and 50% infant death rate, and will be the one to escape the destruction of planet earth by sun’s evolution. You cannot have one without the other.
I don't think OP is asking whether we should give up looking for advances in astrophysics. OP is asking "why did we add all of these freaking popups and theme tweaks? They're distracting me from using my computer to make advances in astrophysics!"
You remind me that I didn't have a sound card at the time and I played all my games (mostly LucasArts) with the PC speaker. For me, the MIDI versions are too boring as they lack the "raw electric power" of the speaker that I loved for years.
The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice.
There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file as it's just note and tempo data. But many people probably associate them with the OPL2 synthesizer chip on AdLib and early SoundBlaster cards. [1]
Now that we have high fidelity digital sound output on even the cheapest computers/devices, at least 44 kHz, at least two channels, and at least 16 bits per sample, we can emulate (or play a recording of) anything.
[1] Personally I remember this midi file sounding different/better. Maybe because I'm remembering using a Sound Blaster AWE64 while playing these things in Windows?
I find it very painful that modern computers still have such terrible midi chips, and modern operating systems don't come with decent midi synthesisers. It's a real hassle trying to get reasonable sounding MIDI on either windows or macOS.
And, of course, because it could play square waves, you could bitbang it to play digitized audio using PWM. Sounded terrible, and super CPU-heavy (so not useful in games), but still.
In 1900, QRS began making piano rolls. By 1920, they had invented a machine to capture piano players directly and over the years QRS captured many including Liberace, George Gershwin, and even Roger Miller playing Autumn Leaves.
QRS is still in business and some of its product lines use Midi conversions of piano rolls and last month I landed a mixed lot with a bunch of those Midi files on 3.5” floppy disks.
I had George Gershwin rocking a Yamaha XG clavichord and Liberace on a Sitar and similar shenanigans.
MIDI in consumer use mostly went away once digitized sound became cheap enough. Though it's still very much there if you're composing or engraving music, for example with a program like MuseScore.
As others have already said, MIDI is a spec and does not contain any actual sounds. General Midi's big thing was probably its defined list of sounds but that was really only a naming convention.
The great thing about MIDI is that it is easily routable to any number of things (physical instruments, samplers, etc.).
Being able to listen to Sonic 2 - Chemical Zone with a combination of a Minimoog Model D and a Jun-6 (basically a Juno-6) is unbelievably fun.
Please please please NEVER disable video player controls. Like a fool I didn't lower my system volume, and got blasted with maximum volume of the YouTube video.
Because in order to get the best dynamic range while listening to diverse music, you need to detect the loudness of tracks and albums and adjust the gain of each track/album accordingly. In order to have room for the music player to adjust the volume higher for quieter tracks, you need to apply a "pregain" to lower the volume overall, while turning up your speakers to compensate. This solves the problem, but by doing this, your music player will generally have a lower volume relative to all other applications on the system, meaning that it generally will be desirable to turn down application-specific volume knobs accordingly.
The loss of information from a reduction of bit depth is purely a reduction of signal-to-noise ratio; the least significant bit is dithered to eliminate quantization distortion. In normal domestic listening scenarios this is usually imperceptible, because the noise floor imposed by dither is below the threshold of hearing for any reasonable gain staging.
I don't think this is true in practice anymore. Given that most sources are 16 bit wide, and afaik most OSes internally use 24 bits these days in the OS mixer (at least my laptop does), the information loss is negligible (just some rounding errors and that's it).
I'd be much more worried about 44.1khz sources being resampled to 48khz if that's the OS playback rate. I mean you won't be able to hear that either in practice but at least it's not negligible.
I do not want to have to go hunt down the app in a list of all currently running apps in some os-level mixer to turn down or up one app. It is absolutely both an os and an app function. Both are needed.
It's a problem because the OS doesn't mandate control. If every app had to function via OS volume controls and APIs, the world would be a wonderful place.
Truly first-class audio with sublime control plane ergonomics.
That'll never happen since any random app developer can just multiply audio volume by a float in whatever API and attach their own unique take on a slider. I'll merit the cases where you need to have individual level and channel controls, such as editing software and professional music tools, but most apps are not these.
It's times like this when I do appreciate Apple's dictatorial take on things, though even they could not win this fight.
Clearly there is a need to give different volumes to different apps, so you can have quiet background music while a timer app is louder, or Zoom is louder.
Ideally there would be an OS-level mixer to independently set the volume of each app. I believe Windows has this, Mac definitely doesn't. And for convenience, an app's local volume control would exist, but set it at the OS mixer level, so you don't have them competing with each other.
But without this, an app does have to have local volume controls.
Also, it's important to be able to set gain as well, i.e. turn the volume "above 100%". For those YouTube videos that for some reason are only 5% as loud as other videos. Even better is if you can set the gain per-video so that it won't be absurdly loud and clipping when you move on to the next video.
Bonus points if an OS or media player ever gives the option of a dynamic compressor, so you can actually listen to those amateur podcasts where one speaker's microphone is 10x quieter than another's. Or listen to the quiet parts of classical music recordings even in the presence of background noise.
There are no controls to indicate that you can pause and restart, but this just-click-anywhere-to-play/pause has been standard on all video players everywhere for a long time.
For those who remember... :) man I miss when things are simpler, slower, maybe more manual, more tedious, but more configurable, more buggy, but more creative. I understand we got here through multiple step changes of improvements, but I'm just nostalgic - good memories!
Could media player actually just play midi dumps like this back in the day?
I've been on Linux for so long now, that being able to just play a MIDI file without making a bunch of decisions about soundfonts and synthesizers [1] just seems mind-blowing to me now.
Part of me wishes that just by default, mpv or something would just pick a softsynth and just play it (like WMP here) rather than have me install a separate program, pick a sound font, invoke it in some weird way to let it know what soundfont I want, and not even be able to seek back and forth.
there's something steady about this setup. no rush to replace, just quiet continuity. a system that kept adapting without losing itself. not optimized, just enough. canyon.mid plays like it always did. the zip drive fits because it earned its place. nothing here is pretending. it's all real use, stretched across years. machines like this taught patience. they gave back what you put in.
Note: It sounded differently on different sound cards because their wavetable/sound fonts/MIDI chips were different, so there was no canonical, universal rendering of MID files.
I don’t think that’s a good counterargument. For example, an Olympus P-330 dye-sublimation photo printer from 1998 also uses a parallel port, but would nevertheless seem out of place for the Windows 3.11 era.
I mean... to be super honest, I was there, and 1998 was ALSO Windows 3.1 era. The future is not evenly distributed and a TON of people in 1998 still had Windows 3.1 as their daily driver. Windows 95 was a big big thing but a lot of people waited out of choice or necessity. 4MB of RAM was hard to come by for a lot of computers.
My point is that while there is a small time window where Zip drives were available and Windows 3.11 was still the latest consumer Windows (ignoring NT here), Zip drives feel more like Windows 95-era. A stack of 3.5” floppy disks would have felt more authentic.
It's a very "borderline between eras" picture. The 1000 RSX was a late Tandy model. It has a 386 CPU and VGA graphics, which makes it a pretty reasonable Win 3.11 machine. It's a system that could technically run Win 95 but it'd struggle with that CPU and limited RAM capacity. You really wanted a 486 or Pentium for Win 95.
The monitor is the standard Tandy VGA monitor of the system's era. The styling on the speakers feel newer than the RSX's 1991 launch, they're more what I'd expect from the mid to late 90s.
You had to upgrade the VGA chip's BIOS to use Win 95 on it:
> The ACUMOS VGA graphics can be software-updated with Cirrus Logic BIOS (via MS-DOS driver) to allow VESA/SVGA to function in Windows 95, as the Windows 3.xx Tandy VGA drivers are insufficient for Windows 95.
I think the background image is probably authentic, it has the feel of a mid-late 90s digital camera picture. It reads to me as the desk of someone who is trying to keep that system alive long past its prime years. Which were arguably over before they started, given 486 systems had been available for a bit when this launched. We end up with an early 90s system with a handful of mid-late 90s peripherals.
The bigger problem to me is this sounds like MIDI played back on a sound card with FM synthesis. The 1000 RSX had the poorly supported Tandy 3 tones + DAC sound hardware. You could install an AdLib, Sound Blaster, or other card to give it MIDI FM synth capability, but the base system can't do it. Alas, we can't see the back to see if it has such an upgrade...
When I was a kid, I was using Windows 95 for a while when Me was already a thing - newer versions could technically run, but the experience wasn't great on that hardware. You could even still find Windows 3.11 computers at my school at the time. Computers don't go die at the exact moment a successor becomes available on the market.
The Tandy 1000 RSX had a 386SX. The 386SX was a lower cost, 16-bit data bus version. Windows 95 minimum requirements were a 386DX (32-bit data bus) or better with a 486 recommended. Here's an excerpt from the comp.sys.tandy FAQ. If nothing else, read the second paragraph.
* III.C.1. Can I run Windows on my 1000?
...
The RLX's can run Windows 3.1 in standard mode only, if they have the RAM
upgraded to 1M. The RLX just barely meets the minimum hardware require-
ments for Windows 3.1, however, and performance will be poor. Windows will
not recognize the built-in mouse (see section II.G.2.). One user says of
Windows 3.1 on the 1000RLX:
Windows' performance is tolerable on a 486DX2/66. I like it on the RLX
because I can start a program, go to the bathroom, and when I come back
only have to wait a few minutes before I can actually use the #@$% thing.
The RSX's can run Windows 3.1 (or 3.11) in 386 enhanced mode if the memory
has been upgraded to 2M or more. There is a Windows sound driver for the
RSX's built-in sound at my ftp/WWW site and at Tandy's support WWW site (see
sections IV.B.1. and IV.B.2.).
Tandy does not officially support the use of Windows on any model of the
1000-series. The RSX's could theoretically run Windows 95, but Microsoft
does not recommend Win95 for 386's.
These are 1992-era MIDI files that came bundled with MIDISoft Recording Session. Note that they contain both "Base" and "Extended" tracks in the same file, so there will be piano notes on channel 16 that are supposed to be percussion. A MIDI player such as Falcosoft Soundfont MIDI Player will detect those kinds of songs and automatically mute channel 16. (There is actually a way to mark channel 16 as a percussion channel, but the people who made those midis in 1992 didn't know about it)
What a wild ride we have taken with computing over the last 40 years. I’m 43 and my first computer looked even older than this - one color display, dual floppy disks and no hard drive. Now we have AI deploy to gigaclouds and monitor it with pocket computers.
The gory details: the Apple II had a simple TTL output connected to a speaker -- crude, not meant for music, and certainly not with two voices. Did this stop me? Read on.
I created an assembly-language player that switched the TTL speaker driver's output at 8 kilohertz, then created two musical voices by controlling the pulse width of the 8 KHz clock. So two voices, two notes at once, from a TTL driver.
I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000".
Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card, which is what was depicted in the YouTube video. But the computer did have one ISA slot, and an Adlib or Sound Blaster compatible card could have been installed.
It also had a 386 processor rather than the 286 normally found on Tandy 1000 computers, and 1MB of RAM.
It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
Are you talking about the 90s or now? Because those were all at least as true then as now. Everything took forever. You needed more RAM every month. Everything crashed constantly. I had to reinstall Win98SE so many fucking times that I can still type F73WT-WHD3J-CD4VR-2GWKD-T38YD from memory.
The amount of suck in commercial software is constant. Companies always prioritize adding the shiny-looking features that sell software to rubes over improving things like memory use, response time, and general quality of life until the quality of life is actually bad enough to drive customers to another vendor, so it's perpetually bad enough to keep the average customer right on the edge of "oh fuck this, I'm switching to something else."
My whole machine reboots in less than 10 seconds. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a decade. I haven’t had significant data loss from a failed drive or a corrupt machine in.. I can’t remember. Even DaVinci Resolve is ready to run in a few short seconds.
This is all on a machine I bought 6-8 years ago. I reboot my phone and watch and laptop when I think to, not because I have to. I run half a dozen browsers and hundreds of tabs and play YouTube while waiting for a remote machine to deploy to an immutable temp instance that gets destroyed after every test cycle.
I speak to my AIs and I can live and work anywhere on this planet that legally allows me.
There are problems in our world and on our machines and in our governments but apps don’t take 10 seconds to load.
Except ServiceNow. I’ll give you that one.
As if anything done on a machine going through 10_000_000_000 (10 Giga) instructions per seconds should be anything but perceived instantaneous, for it's finite lifetime human user.
(Though I do think it takes significantly longer to start on my 2024 MBP…)
Part of my job when I was a youngn, was rebooting the Windows NT server running the software router because packets stopped forwarding for the entire net cafe.
Every generation has its hype cycle; it's nothing new.
Is it? I think there's a common tendency to "stop exploring" cultural artifacts very deeply as we age, but not everyone shares this trait. Some people continue to value novelty in those areas well into old age.
For my part, treasured artifacts of my youth don't impede my ability to appreciate new things. And indeed, I think many videogames I loved dearly have aged poorly.
And to me the best desktop experience in term of software has been gnome 3 after it had time to hone its jump forward from its previous major release. So, not the newest hot thing out there, but not my first crush.
Regarding forward, augmented reality on glasses seems to have great potentials, but I don't have much hope foe the default systems they will come with. A future where most people wear those stuff filled with signal tailored by the ad industry and whatever governments is just not letting much room escaping the obvious various dystopian scenarios.
U.S. debt in the 1950s was well below $1T, in the 1990s it was something around $3T, now it's $36T.
Having said that, I wasn’t the only person deeply upset when Greenspan gave the green light for Bush’s tax cuts. Under Clinton we were on track to wipe out the debt in another 10 years.
Things in the 90s were more straightforward because supply chains and business processes were much shorter and less complex. What people interpret as nostalgia might actually reflect a recognition that systems/products genuinely were more efficient before they became increasingly layered with intermediaries and dependencies.
An illustration of these dependencies and layers is debt - the mounting complexity parallels the mounting debt levels.
Had they? I gamed in the 90s and I game now. And boy, its not even remotely the same and iam thrilled to see what comes next (hello, gta6)
I am happy with the potential that we have available today to do things that we couldn't in the past. And it's always possible to improve software on top of more capable hardware and OSes.
Software in the '90s was mostly driven by altruism, software in '20s starts with an A-round.
(… although there are sometimes "seed" rounds that precede a series A, or even pre-seed rounds … like everything else, it's complicated & messy. But hopefully you see the metaphor the parent was trying to paint.)
Also because everyone seems too scared to practice adversarial interoperability.
Also because SoCs are now a thing which allows unhackable secure boot and other DRM-like functionality that prevents people from modifying their own devices to act in their own interest, or, as is the case with Android devices, allows it but punishes the user for having gained full access to their own device.
Nearly 19000 games were released on Steam in 2024. A lot of the most interesting stuff that came out simply wouldn't have existed 10 or 20 years ago. I think it's great that those things can exist now and potentially find an audience.
It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities.
The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and desire.
The same drive for betterment that made our species “kill such beautiful minimalism” was the one that lifted billions out of subsistence farming and 50% infant death rate, and will be the one to escape the destruction of planet earth by sun’s evolution. You cannot have one without the other.
Curiosity and desire can be focused on minimalism and elegance of the smallest most essential cores of whatever is at stake.
I'd say try Linux.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8T5pyGiTPdE
- A Windows 3.1 window manager theme
- The Windows 3.1 fonts with font hinting/antialiasing disabled
- Windows 3.1 icons
- A matching cursor theme
- Lower your display resolution
My, where did the years go...
Good times.
You may enjoy chiptunes. Wikipedia has samples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune (see: Contemporary chiptune music)
There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file as it's just note and tempo data. But many people probably associate them with the OPL2 synthesizer chip on AdLib and early SoundBlaster cards. [1]
Now that we have high fidelity digital sound output on even the cheapest computers/devices, at least 44 kHz, at least two channels, and at least 16 bits per sample, we can emulate (or play a recording of) anything.
[1] Personally I remember this midi file sounding different/better. Maybe because I'm remembering using a Sound Blaster AWE64 while playing these things in Windows?
I am reminded of Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, which let the PC speaker output something beyond just bleeps and bloops.
In the case of canyon.mid there is because it was composed for a specific midi instrument with a particular set of timbres.
Or to put it another way, it’s music and therefore complicated.
QRS is still in business and some of its product lines use Midi conversions of piano rolls and last month I landed a mixed lot with a bunch of those Midi files on 3.5” floppy disks.
I had George Gershwin rocking a Yamaha XG clavichord and Liberace on a Sitar and similar shenanigans.
Finally, “high fidelity” is not a synonym for “musical.”
The great thing about MIDI is that it is easily routable to any number of things (physical instruments, samplers, etc.).
Being able to listen to Sonic 2 - Chemical Zone with a combination of a Minimoog Model D and a Jun-6 (basically a Juno-6) is unbelievably fun.
The audio sounds like it sounds because Microsoft Licensed Roland’s GS Wavetable. Without that you lose timbral information.
And any OPL is almost certainly emulated, not an actual chip.
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, most video codecs aren't tremendously efficient with static screens.
What a step up it was over the bleeps that came out of the PC. Like going from B&W to color TV. Advances like that were commonplace back then.
Maybe we'll have fun again with quantum computing.
1. generate audio signal
2. reduce volume of that signal, losing information because it's quantised
3. take that volume-reduced signal and boost it right back up again, but now with the lower bits destroyed
You can make this effect as bad as you like, e.g. turn it down to 1% and then amplify by 100x... but why?
More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuEtQqC-Sqo
https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-dithering-in-audio....
I'd be much more worried about 44.1khz sources being resampled to 48khz if that's the OS playback rate. I mean you won't be able to hear that either in practice but at least it's not negligible.
Truly first-class audio with sublime control plane ergonomics.
That'll never happen since any random app developer can just multiply audio volume by a float in whatever API and attach their own unique take on a slider. I'll merit the cases where you need to have individual level and channel controls, such as editing software and professional music tools, but most apps are not these.
It's times like this when I do appreciate Apple's dictatorial take on things, though even they could not win this fight.
Clearly there is a need to give different volumes to different apps, so you can have quiet background music while a timer app is louder, or Zoom is louder.
Ideally there would be an OS-level mixer to independently set the volume of each app. I believe Windows has this, Mac definitely doesn't. And for convenience, an app's local volume control would exist, but set it at the OS mixer level, so you don't have them competing with each other.
But without this, an app does have to have local volume controls.
Also, it's important to be able to set gain as well, i.e. turn the volume "above 100%". For those YouTube videos that for some reason are only 5% as loud as other videos. Even better is if you can set the gain per-video so that it won't be absurdly loud and clipping when you move on to the next video.
Bonus points if an OS or media player ever gives the option of a dynamic compressor, so you can actually listen to those amateur podcasts where one speaker's microphone is 10x quieter than another's. Or listen to the quiet parts of classical music recordings even in the presence of background noise.
https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic and others.
Clicks for the click God!
There are no controls to indicate that you can pause and restart, but this just-click-anywhere-to-play/pause has been standard on all video players everywhere for a long time.
* Emu Proteus 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5FffG_0sqw
* Emu Proteus 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4KW9uWCY3A
* Roland MT-32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdSKg5G9MPc&t=22s
* Roland D-10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXGdyp7Ml-Y
* Roland SC-33: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as_jVNIvleI (complete with MIDI animation)
* Yamaha MU100: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BL_RzeWDxg (1 hour!)
Etc. Don't know if they still do, but it was a thing when these "romplers" came on the market.
I've been on Linux for so long now, that being able to just play a MIDI file without making a bunch of decisions about soundfonts and synthesizers [1] just seems mind-blowing to me now.
Part of me wishes that just by default, mpv or something would just pick a softsynth and just play it (like WMP here) rather than have me install a separate program, pick a sound font, invoke it in some weird way to let it know what soundfont I want, and not even be able to seek back and forth.
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MIDI#List_of_SoundFonts
The monitor is the standard Tandy VGA monitor of the system's era. The styling on the speakers feel newer than the RSX's 1991 launch, they're more what I'd expect from the mid to late 90s.
You had to upgrade the VGA chip's BIOS to use Win 95 on it:
> The ACUMOS VGA graphics can be software-updated with Cirrus Logic BIOS (via MS-DOS driver) to allow VESA/SVGA to function in Windows 95, as the Windows 3.xx Tandy VGA drivers are insufficient for Windows 95.
ref: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Tandy_1000_R-Series
I think the background image is probably authentic, it has the feel of a mid-late 90s digital camera picture. It reads to me as the desk of someone who is trying to keep that system alive long past its prime years. Which were arguably over before they started, given 486 systems had been available for a bit when this launched. We end up with an early 90s system with a handful of mid-late 90s peripherals.
The bigger problem to me is this sounds like MIDI played back on a sound card with FM synthesis. The 1000 RSX had the poorly supported Tandy 3 tones + DAC sound hardware. You could install an AdLib, Sound Blaster, or other card to give it MIDI FM synth capability, but the base system can't do it. Alas, we can't see the back to see if it has such an upgrade...
When I was a kid, I was using Windows 95 for a while when Me was already a thing - newer versions could technically run, but the experience wasn't great on that hardware. You could even still find Windows 3.11 computers at my school at the time. Computers don't go die at the exact moment a successor becomes available on the market.
* III.C.1. Can I run Windows on my 1000?
...
The RLX's can run Windows 3.1 in standard mode only, if they have the RAM upgraded to 1M. The RLX just barely meets the minimum hardware require- ments for Windows 3.1, however, and performance will be poor. Windows will not recognize the built-in mouse (see section II.G.2.). One user says of Windows 3.1 on the 1000RLX:
Windows' performance is tolerable on a 486DX2/66. I like it on the RLX because I can start a program, go to the bathroom, and when I come back only have to wait a few minutes before I can actually use the #@$% thing.
The RSX's can run Windows 3.1 (or 3.11) in 386 enhanced mode if the memory has been upgraded to 2M or more. There is a Windows sound driver for the RSX's built-in sound at my ftp/WWW site and at Tandy's support WWW site (see sections IV.B.1. and IV.B.2.).
Tandy does not officially support the use of Windows on any model of the 1000-series. The RSX's could theoretically run Windows 95, but Microsoft does not recommend Win95 for 386's.
https://www.dwedit.org/files/session_midi.zip
https://www.dwedit.org/files/session_midi_2.zip
Looking at it now, I love how they used a scroll bar as the UI widget to represent playback progress.
https://www.brianorr.com/blog/2010/01/14/windows-95-easter-e...
All right. Apropos the retro theme, here's a Web page dedicated to my Apple II program "Electric Duet": https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/
The gory details: the Apple II had a simple TTL output connected to a speaker -- crude, not meant for music, and certainly not with two voices. Did this stop me? Read on.
I created an assembly-language player that switched the TTL speaker driver's output at 8 kilohertz, then created two musical voices by controlling the pulse width of the 8 KHz clock. So two voices, two notes at once, from a TTL driver.
Here's a sample of the music Electric Duet created, on an Apple II, in 1981: https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/music_tracks/prelude.mp3 -- press the play button.
That's retro defined.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779729