It's enjoyable to think everyone spoke like that at the time, but I suspect their spoken language was more pedestrian (though it would be quite odd to our ears).
These days it's written language that is pedestrian (especially with WFH because COVID, I write more than I speak these days, except to my cat, who can't read) - it is, as you say, spewing out words, though usually onto a screen. There is vanishingly small cost to each character typed, and erasing/editing is free, and we're all in a terrible hurry to get on to the next thing.
Back then, there were no keyboards, the physical act of writing took time, and the materials had cost. There was more need to think about the words before writing them down. If you were halfway down the page of a neatly worded letter, you'd consider your next words more carefully before writing them down, because changing your mind after scribbling something down was messy and time-consuming - try to erase the ink, or scratch something out, or recopy it all onto a new sheet.
These days, though, I find myself spewing nearly stream of consciousness, then tweaking for a bit before sending, even on a short missive. I keep going back, for instance, to an English teacher who drilled into me to reconsider every it/they/he/she to see if it read better (more clearly) that way, or with repeating the name. Lots of little editing bits like that.
Of course, by that standard, someone with an iPad with a keyboard attached (the ones that are part of a case/cover) could just as easily consider their keyboard "permanent".
Counter-counterpoint would be, Apple becomes a customer of the API, and then someone else (Google, Facebook, whoever) buys Dark Sky and Apple has to scramble.
I'm bitter too, I build my own local/remote weather station at home (several Raspberry Pi's, an Arduino with a custom shield, and 15k lines of Python), which uses Dark Sky's API as one of its data sources. This means I have a year or so to find a new data source and rewrite a bunch of code (and no source is going to give me exactly the same data from the same sensors, so my 3-4 years of historical data is going to have a definite before/after cutoff in it).
> Apple has a monopoly on the channel to deliver iOS apps.
That's only a monopoly in the same sense that McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. It's within their own ecosystem. Customers can decide whether they want to buy into that ecosystem or choose an alternative (like Burger King, or Android).
I did my Fortran in high school on punched cards, because the small timesharing system we had (a Cromemco Z80-based S-100 bus machine with a handful of terminals) had a habit of crashing and eating files - but it couldn't eat cards. We had a couple of surplus IBM 029 card punches, and they were a blast to use - they had nice crisp keyboards, and when you pressed a key the machine punched the corresponding holes with what felt like a major league bat hitting a major league fastball pitch - it was a really hard thwhack. Very satisfying.
I remember being astonished when my dad told me how they handled punch card accuracy at his office: engineers would write out their programs on (special) paper forms (i.e. a box for each character on each line), and hand the forms off to the computer department, where they'd have two different keypunch operators key in the program. Then they'd feed the two stacks of cards into a special punched-card-comparator machine, which would tell whether the decks matched. If so, it was considered successfully transcribed (and one of the decks could be thrown away).
I also remember reading a story long ago about decks of cards containing scientific programs being sent by rail between cities in two different countries in Europe (IIRC), and they kept having problems with the programs not working. Finally, they sent a courier along with the box of cards at one point. And, as the train crossed the border, the customs inspector boarded the train and checked passports and such, and inspected goods that were being transported, and, as is customary, took a sample from many of the transported goods (as one might take a bit of grain, say)... and, yeah, they took a couple random cards out of the box. Problem identified, if not immediately solved.
Lately I've been streaming a couple different classical stations (KUSC and KPBS Classical, which is a feed from Classical 24), and I get push notifications from several different local news apps when the city and county start their daily briefings on the local Covid situation. I turn the TV on for those briefings, then go back to classical afterwards. Most of the time, I can expect if any major news happens, the various push notifications will alert me. A bonus of all this is, zero ads.
And getting specifically the local news notifications makes sure the stuff I'm getting is actually applicable to where I am. If you're in a large enough market so that one or more local TV stations have their own local news apps, the push notifications can be useful even if you never look at the app otherwise (as long as the app can be tuned so it doesn't spend all day sending you random less important stuff - recipes and sports scores and human interest stuff - if so try a different station's app).
I've long listened to either classical or chillout / downtempo lounge in the office - mostly Soma.fm or di.fm - because I've found I want music, but don't want words - if there's lyrics, they distract from the programming project at hand.
I do have a small AM/FM radio in good working order, to prepare for the remote chance that the tubes break and the internet stops coming out of the tubes.
My first language was Basic (first on an HP-2000 timesharing system and then on the Apple II), but my second language was 6502 assembly, something for which I will be forever grateful - with the groundwork laid by assembly, C was a wonderful step up, handling all the tedious parts of writing assembly while allowing nearly all the same precision and control - reading the original K&R book was a transcendent experience. After those, other languages were easy.
For a humorous taste of a limited language, without venturing outside of English, Randall Munroe (the XKCD guy) has a book called, "Thing Explainer", that's a sort of encyclopedia written using only the 1,000 most common words in English.
No, that was a network, but it was very much not the Internet. Different technologies.
Per Wikipedia, "The Internet (portmanteau of interconnected network) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide."
The network of UUCP-connected machines (also called UUCPNET) did not use TCP/IP and had no inbuilt notion of how to get packets from one place to another. One had to specifically list a set of instructions, a path, from source to destination hosts. UUCPNET was entirely store-and-forward, and sent entire messages, not packets. And it was in wide use throughout the 80's before the Internet became a thing (which happened once researchers started interconnecting networks that used TCP/IP).
To say that UUCPNET was the Internet just without the web, is like saying that radio _is_ TV, just without the pictures.
Before the Internet there was Usenet and a world-wide network network of machines connected together via UUCP, doing email and such over point-to-point dialup (modem) links. Sending mail was a matter of knowing a complete path through the network from your source machine to the recipient's destination machine (and Usenet news implemented public discussion groups over this network). If I recall correctly, you could send specially formatted email messages to the server where the RFCs lived, and an autoresponder program would read your message and email back the requested RFCs.
That's not their reason for discontinuing it though - there's no reason for them to sell the 3, 4, and 5. Probably retooled the 4's assembly line to make 5's.
These days it's written language that is pedestrian (especially with WFH because COVID, I write more than I speak these days, except to my cat, who can't read) - it is, as you say, spewing out words, though usually onto a screen. There is vanishingly small cost to each character typed, and erasing/editing is free, and we're all in a terrible hurry to get on to the next thing.
Back then, there were no keyboards, the physical act of writing took time, and the materials had cost. There was more need to think about the words before writing them down. If you were halfway down the page of a neatly worded letter, you'd consider your next words more carefully before writing them down, because changing your mind after scribbling something down was messy and time-consuming - try to erase the ink, or scratch something out, or recopy it all onto a new sheet.
These days, though, I find myself spewing nearly stream of consciousness, then tweaking for a bit before sending, even on a short missive. I keep going back, for instance, to an English teacher who drilled into me to reconsider every it/they/he/she to see if it read better (more clearly) that way, or with repeating the name. Lots of little editing bits like that.
But I do love the sound of a well-turned phrase.