I'm sure it has evolved, but Midnight Command began as a recreation of Norton Commander for DOS PCs. I've not used Midnight Commander in particular, but back in my DOS programming days Norton Commander was my best friend.
SF author Michael Flynn was a process control engineer as his day job; he wrote about how designing statistically valid experiments is incredibly difficult, and the potential for fooling yourself is high, even when you really do know what you are doing and you have nearly perfect control over the measurement setup.
And on top of it you're trying to measure the behavior of people not widgets; and people change their behavior based on the context and what they think you're measuring.
There was a lab set up to do "experimental economics" at Caltech back in the late 80's/early 90's. Trouble is, people make different economic decisions when they are working with play money rather than real money.
Expermential Design is one of the big four adacemic subjects within Statistics. The math is complex even before the issues of the effects of the expermential situation.
I remember the dotCom bubble. After the bubble burst, people got on with putting storefronts and other kinds of business on-line in a more sober fashion.
I predict the same thing will happen with the current AI tools: the bubble will burst, a bunch of folks will lose their shirts, and the world in general will come to a more realistic and sober understanding of what they are good for. We will figure out how to provide the useful parts without massive data centers and it will become natural. (I remember when things a graphics card can do trivially required a supercomputer with supporting staff.)
But taking notes and writing ideas out requires that we think them through...which we usually don't do otherwise. This has been a commonplace of the intellectual life for centuries.
Words and thoughts are wholly separate. Notes aren't the direct results of perception, they are more like sportscasters reading the mind of pitchers.
Notes point to thoughts or observations, they aren't the thoughts themselves.
“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.”
Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
I did not say that my brain uses linguistic representations internally when I think; I said that the process of turning my ideas into words helps me think.
Actually you said "writing ideas out requires that we think them through" and this isn't what's happening in brains. In actuality, words interfere with our ability to think.
I arrange my code to follow a certain order, so that I can get my head back into a given module quickly. I don't remember everything; there's too much over the weeks, months, and years. But I can remember enough to find what I need to know if I structure it properly. Not unlike, you know, a Zettlekasten.
In my experience, a lot of the hard thinking gets done in my back-brain while I'm doing other things, and emerges when I take up the problem again. Doing the regular work gives my back-brain time to percolate; doing hard thing after hard thing doesn't.
Not knocking your history, but I gotta say that Wolfenstein-3D was like nothing I'd ever seen...and I played the original Wolfenstein on the Apple II--and the original Wizardry as well, which is a lot more to the point than Rogue IMHO. The Wizardry map grid and the Wolfenstein-3D map grid are really similar, now that I think about it.
I do what the author does all the time, every day. But then, I work mostly on my own; and I've spent decades learning how to structure my code so as to minimize the amount that has to be "live" in my head at any give moment, and so that I can quickly rebuild that mental model on re-reading.
There were lots of blogs that were personal diaries back in the early days; but there were always many blogs the weren't. The first "web log", in my opinion, was the page at NCSA, home of the Mosaic browser, that was literally a log of new web servers coming on-line. I used to go there daily to see what was new. (Later I used Yahoo for that purpose; and not much later than that I gave up. :-)
Another big site for early blogging was Dave Winer's "Scripting News", in which he talked about Frontier and Radio Userland, two early web platforms. Winer was also responsible for "EditThisPage", the first web site I ever saw that allowed editing a website on another server through the browser. It was followed by Weblogs.com, which hosted some of the earliest blogs. I had one there, briefly.
And then, of course, there was GeoCities, where you explicitly picked your "city" based on the kinds of things you were going to be writing about. Blogging was always extremely hetergeneous.
What we didn't have in the early days was monetization or, naturally, an intense focus on monetization.
I was the first person I knew to learn HTML; that was in the mid-90’s. I had a personal website from December of 1996, where I posted mostly book reviews; later it evolved into a hand-coded blog, followed by MovableType, followed by WordPress, which I still use.
