I Miss Good Software

I remember, as a kid, being fascinated by all of the software that came with the family PC. I learned to play solitaire, then "graduated" to Black Jack. The mechanics and puzzles of Chips Challenge are something I still think about years later. That pure-evil-incarnate yeti in Ski Free.

It wasn't just the games that fascinated me, though. I remember friends and I sharing pixel art creations laboriously authored in MS Paint. My sisters and I would leave each other notes in the form of .txt files, scattered all over the file system, which we wrote in Notepad; as a kid, I started my journey into HTML and making websites with Notepad. Was Conway's Game of Life a "game"? I still don't know, but I've developed my own implementation of it on multiple occasions, and have a hard copy of a book about it on my shelf. I wasted a lot of paper and ink, printing out things made in Microsoft Publisher. And Word was where I began to apply my young imagination to written form.

As a slightly-older kid, armed with a Dummies book and a C compiler, I started learning how to build simple software that did simple things. I also played a lot of Age of Empires. I remember CDs that you would buy (or find in a garage sale bin) that contained thousands of tools and games. I remember shareware, demo versions, and wishing I could buy licenses for the full thing. I remember a lot of birthday and Christmas gifts being boxes of software.

This software was simple. It was good. It made me powerful.

Now? Not even Notepad is simple, and Microsoft somehow managed to break it entirely.