Comment by nine_k
8 hours ago
I'm afraid that the feeling of magic if (was) a phenomenon related to passing the boundary between the "black and white" and "full color" worlds, not the "full color" world itself.
What we have now easily available offers much more unlimited possibilities. 24-bit color, 4K resolution, all the 3D you may care about, all the audio you may care about, gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage, easy programmability from tinker-friendly stuff like pygame or processing.org or löve to world-construction kits like Godot. Or the whole Web thing. All available at a trivial cost or free. Where's the magic though?
I think that much of the "magic" feeling comes from pushing things to the limit, and beyond. This requires a limited possibility. Basically all art is built around some kind of a limitation and playing with it.
(Being young and having time to tinker with hardware just for the joy of the audiovisual effects goes without saying.)
I think there's truth to what you say.
The Amiga pushed the boundary in so many directions at once that the horizon extended far beyond what I was used to with the DOS/EGA/TSR/ISA/x86/PC Speaker environment. Or, the monochrome VT100/PDP-11/multitasking/multiuser systems I used in college.
At the same time, it was clear the horizon was limited...but could be pushed back through a combination of cleverness, and discovery, and code. You felt like there were true discoveries to be made, whether it was through looking at source code found on UUCP, by finally understanding the purpose of some struct found in the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual, or just experimenting with blitter or copper code.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the depth of knowledge available, computing today feels stale; anything "new" is only new to you. A million people would look at your "innovation" with disdain as its such a well-trodden path.
In a way I welcome AI-based coding, because if there's no joy (for me) in the (coding/discovery) journey, perhaps I can at least feel there's magic in getting to a new destination more quickly than ever.