Text based computer interface
When I was in high school computers were growing their first thin roots in general education. PCs were still expensive and difficult to paintain* in working order. My school bought a lab worth of PCs with windows on them and additionally got some really old boxes from a bank as a donation. The bank PCs weren't powerful enough for Windows at that time, nor were reasonable desktop options available on Linux, so our lab manager installed the then free Red Hat on them with CLI only, together with Lynx, Pine etc.
The lab was open to general studentry during brakes (home PCs were still rare and hunger for the Internet was huge even though xxx was strictly verboten) and with one PC for every 30 pupils only the sharp elbowed got their vaunted online time. The white on black screens with their blinking cursors, howere, remained vacant all the time. Yes, it was then that I learned to love the blinking cursor - one could get everything done on those machines, since the only use for graphical display connected to the Internet was banned anyway and, worse, the ban was strictly enforced.
It was good times. Textual information would be conveyed in text form, not a JPEG or a TikTok dance, Brin and Page were yet to apply for the grant for their Lego server, which only later turned into the privacy, social and ecological nightmare we are having now, the systemd guy was still bullying his kindergarten mates and not the whole world... I'd hazard a guess that the only thing those machines would struggle with today is TLS, the rest would still be quite serviceable, if we managed to keep to text. (I quite like curent KDE though:)
Icon: happy Friday!
* Originally a typo but I'm keeping it as like the word!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
