Comment by 0815test
7 years ago
> Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality.
Right. We used to do perfectly serviceable work on extremely small screens, sometimes displaying as few as 40 columns and a dozen rows of text, and with keyboards that were so painful to type on that most commands would be abbreviated to 2 or 3 characters. Current versions of Linux still include a "quirk" for supporting an uppercase-only text mode that was common on early terminals and microcomputers. So no, hardware capabilities are not an inherent obstacle here. Providing an information- and interaction-dense UI on such limited devices is definitely a challenge that will require some added work, but the kind of 'convergence' that Purism is talking about is a necessary building block.
_Most_ people did not use computers like that at all, and it's not like they weren't tedious for those of us who did. There was simply no alternative at the time -- there is now.
Apparently they were quite good, given the amount of posts how great it is to live in a text terminal. /s
Don't get me wrong, I use and love a lot of terminal-based software. But from an information density perspective, my computer can display seven 80 column terminals over a hundred rows tall at once. Also, my keyboard is not awful, so I can actually do a lot of typing very quickly. For the occasions where I need a mouse or graphics they're readily available.
So echoes of, but not at all constrained like, computers from that era.