Lovely article. The clear superiority of the C64 experience in some respects as well as the popularity of Pico-8 (including amongst longtime games industry veterans) both indicate that something is seriously amiss with current computing; it's not just nostalgia. Both offer a much greater immediacy and responsiveness that makes them more productive in many settings despite their primitiveness.
It's not like the C64 or Basic were earth shattering marvels of design either so the fact that the c64-inspired but ~5 orders of magnitude more powerful raspberry Pi 4 compares very unfavourable in terms of startup time and probably quite a few other latency metrics is pretty depressing.
It's not like the C64 or Basic were earth shattering marvels of design either so the fact that the c64-inspired but ~5 orders of magnitude more powerful raspberry Pi 4 compares very unfavourable in terms of startup time and probably quite a few other latency metrics is pretty depressing.