The year was 1993 and I was doing a course and being certified into WordStar - I think it was version 7 ?!.. And this was a word processor should behave more like a handwritten manuscript than a typewriter. Sure, it sounds backwards until Robert walks through the mechanics. Ten bookmarks. Deferred block moves. Visible private notes that never print. Cursor movement that keeps fingers on the home row. He’s really describing stateful thinking, not nostalgia. Everything was keyboard based back then, I also had to knew the commands by heart and maybe that's what helped me and drove me to write even more. Hence these newsletters, maybe ... I get that creative work is full of half-made decisions, temporary markers and sudden returns to an earlier thought, and a tool that demands ceremony at each of those moments taxes the user at exactly the wrong time. Any engineer who has lost a line of reasoning to a modal dialog should recognise the complaint, even with VI... A control-key grammar can be superb once internalised, but it also builds a wall around the fluent user. WordStar still survives because its interface became part of our cognitive process, whilst modern software often sells collaboration, cloud sync and AI assistance as upgrades to writing.

Tereza gets the market psychology right before she gets to the market mechanics. Cheap creation changes how buyers behave. Once a team believes it can build a passable internal tool in an afternoon, every vendor invoice starts looking negotiable. That alone is enough to make a lot of middling SaaS feel exposed. Her article is also good on status; software engineering has benefited from a useful mystique: hard language, hard tooling, hard hiring filters, and vibecoding punctures that mystique at the edges. I don’t think it erases expertise, but it does invite the same exhausting chorus designers and marketers already know: everyone has feedback, few people can ship the work well. Yet, software isn’t just a screen that does a tasks, iit is permissions, audit trails, support contracts, procurement, migration risk and the grim little spreadsheet where someone records who owns the thing after its maker leaves. Water is a neat metaphor for abundance, but companies still pay heavily for plumbing, testing and someone legally accountable when it floods the basement.

Geri’s Game quite changes the deployment target; as Pixar stopped treating the human as a failed simulation and started treating him as an engineered performance object. That is a very different brief. It gives the animators permission to simplify anatomy, exaggerate timing and let weight do more of the persuasive work. Sure, audiences are brutal at spotting bad humans because we spend our lives reading faces, posture and gravity. A lamp has less baggage. A toy has even more freedom. Billy in Tin Toy is impressive because the problem was monstrous, but he sits in that awkward zone where technical effort makes the remaining faults louder. Plastic skin. Stiff motion. A baby who feels slightly assembled. Jan’s move is the clever one. He didn’t chase the actor. He reached back to Jiří and the puppet stage, where a figure can be plainly artificial and still feel alive. So, systems become more reliable when their abstraction matches their strengths, ie force a platform to impersonate a medium it can’t yet sustain and every seam becomes visible. This piece slightly tidies the story after the fact. Geri needed serious software advances, including Tony’s subdivision surfaces and better cloth. Taste alone didn’t save him; constraint, used deliberately, can look like mastery.

What a nice piece of history! This wood-style side panels do more work than they first appear to.. they tell you Atari knew this thing couldn’t sit beside a joystick and survive the comparison. It had to pass as hi-fi. That is the small professional detail I like most in the piece: the product’s design is already arguing for its category. Generation Amiga gets this oddness right; with the C-240 selling mood, not utility. I’ve seen plenty of modern products make the same move with better silicon and worse honesty. They promise ambient intelligence, presence, delight or vibe. Yet it slightly romanticises the gadget by treating later familiarity as proof of early wisdom. Audio-reactive visuals did become ordinary, but the domestic product still had a thin reason to return. A game gives mastery. A stereo gives fidelity. A visualiser gives atmosphere, and atmosphere is a difficult subscription model before subscriptions even enter the room. Atari had the technical ability to make screens react, but the market soon rewarded cartridges, characters and replay. Distribution pulled the company back towards games. Today's new categories often look ridiculous because the old nouns do all the selling. Console, stereo, television, toy, appliance: the C-240 fitted none of them cleanly.

These scratched DVD drawers are my least glamorous backup strategy, there also with the dusty floppy disks, but Cem makes it look almost radical... right? His force comes from accumulation; one removal is an accident, ten look like a pattern and by the time he reaches Steam licences, Kindle deletions, Funimation digital copies and live-service games that die with their servers, “buy” has started to sound like a user-interface label with legal small print attached. What he gets right is ownership issue, because he treats it as infrastructure, not sentiment. Access now depends on accounts, payment systems, regional rights, moderation policies, authentication servers and whatever strategic pivot arrives after the next earnings call. Example; I bought FIFA 2017 - yes.. - and now I wanted to play it with my kids on the xbox and no dice, couldn't because it wasn't available. It's no longer in the store and I own nothing now. Cem underplays the bargain people knowingly make. Streaming / digital owning is convenient, searchable and cheap enough until it isn’t. Physical media also shifts work back to the user: storage, backups, hardware, format drift, moving house with boxes of plastic rectangles. Real ownership has admin. Ask anyone with a NAS and a mild personality disorder.... mine is just there and I have several others to built... Platforms love licensed access because it turns culture into a managed service. It also turns trust into a balance-sheet variable. Once customers understand that their library is conditional, the product has to compete against a shelf, a hard drive and a growing suspicion that the cloud is just someone else’s revocation engine.