Win 95 feels from era1, xp and git was already in era 2.

Once those two changes were done by 2010 though, there’s been no game changer, if anything we've regressed through shittyfication (we seem to have fewer social networks vs the original Facebook for example, as most of them turned single player feed consumption).

Maybe pre and post LLMs will feel like an era change in a decade as well?

> ...and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.

How are these ideas connected? The intent of git is that you work with patches.

It just really highlights how much better BitKeeper and then Git's design was compared to what came before. You then pile on being free/OSS, and being "proven" by an extremely large, well known, and successful project on top, and you have yourself explosive growth.

There are developers around these days who never had the displeasure of using the pre-Git source control offerings; it was rough.

Gotta love that the disk and directory picker survived 20-30 years.

as a long time windows user, I wish linux copied this feature more

This is how I think about music and Spotify. Pretty much all music exists, you 'just' have to remember everything that exists and what it's called so you can find it.

Recent HN link, Red Alert 2 in your web browser. A game from 25 years ago which you can unofficially download the C++ original version from the Internet Archive to upload to the website which extracts the assets to play in a Javascript based reimplementation inside a web hypertext document browser.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853

That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for a lot of them 2 bytes per symbol was still all that you could possibly need.

Unicode 1.0 was in 1991, UTF-8 happened a year later, and Unicode 2.0 (where more than 65,536 characters became “official”, and UTF-8 was the recommended choice) was in 1996.

That means if you were green-fielding a new bit of tech in 1991, you likely decided 16 bits per character was the correct approach. But in 1992 it started to become clear that maybe a variable with encoding (with 8 bits as the base character size) was on the horizon. And by 1996 it was clear that fixed 16-bit characters was a mistake.

But that 5-year window was an extremely critical time in computing history: Windows NT was invented, so was Java, JavaScript, and a bunch of other things. So, too late, huge swaths of what would become today’s technical landscape had set the problem in stone.

UNIXes only use the “right” technical choice because it was already too hard to move from ASCII to 16-bit characters… but laziness in moving off of ASCII ultimately paid off as it became clear that 16-bits per character was the wrong choice in the first place. But otherwise UNIX would have had the same fate.

Edit: should be done now