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0 pointsbluish292y ago0 comments

> Younger folks who never had a PC with only write protectable floppy drives missed out on a wonderful care-free period when you could just TRY OUT any new software, and your other data was safe, no matter what.

This goes so far now with sandboxing and virtual machines. I think the experience spawning VM to run and test new software is annoying but I guess it is still better than the annoying stuff from that era.

Disclaimer: I am one of those younger folks and probably naive in terms of that era.

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mikewarot2y ago

We didn't have magical slabs of glass that could emulate a whole VAX VMS 11/780 system as a fun exercise in nostalgia, like my cheap ass Motorola phone can ;-)

We were living in an era where floppy disks were so much faster than punch cards, paper tape, cassettes, or just typing in programs after boot.

VMs and Sandboxes get close, but there's always the danger of virtual machine escape. WASM should be able to get us there, if we can keep people from wanting to make it Posix compatible and giving it file/network access.

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