Back then the whole system was designed to do stuff for us. Now, so much of it is designed to work against us. Monstrous towers of complexity for the sole purpose of stopping you getting a high definition output without copy protection, or download a permanent copy of a video you are watching, or learning how your video card works without a million dollars and an NDA. And there was so much less of it. There's huge swathes of unexecuted code just for rendering text backwards in case I wake up Arabic tomorrow, etc.

> suddenly it became something of a chore using the machine…

That really rings true. I can't believe how frustrating it is to get to a place where I can actually focus and do some work.

1. log into my computer with a pincode

2. log into jira, gitlab, confluence with sso (no automatic sign on)

3. ssh into dev containers with key that requires a password

4. open vscode, again ssh into dev containers with a password protected key

5. Close all the popups from IT (usually get 3-5 a day) in the notification area

Heaven help me if IT decided to force an update (I timed one to be 53 minutes). Some days I feel like a custodian instead of an engineer.

I know it's very much a first world problem, but it's shocking how many barriers exist to get any work done in US corporate world. Startups I've worked at didn't have this problem - just get a macbook and here's your gsuite user/pass.

What a story. I never had a chance to play with System 6.0, my first one was Mac OSX Maverick...before DOS/W95-98/XP and Debian/Ubuntu...what was it like?