So... obviously "Centurion" was an also-ran historically. No Great Ideas were embodied by this machine, nor conceived by those using it. It was an encapsulation of ideas from other areas assembled for a more specialized purpose and aimed at an economic niche. It's a VIC-20, not an Apple II.
But what's most striking is how it embraced some areas (Teletype-style interaction) at the expense of new ideas. And... that's not wrong. The ultimate expression of hackers using TTYs to do productive work with a minimal interaction paradigm is still with us today. It showed up on PDP/11 and VAX hardware and not Centurions, but... it might have given a different quirk of history.
That development environment is indeed terrible and awful. But if you give Ritchie and Thompson and Joy one of these for a few years...
But what's most striking is how it embraced some areas (Teletype-style interaction) at the expense of new ideas. And... that's not wrong. The ultimate expression of hackers using TTYs to do productive work with a minimal interaction paradigm is still with us today. It showed up on PDP/11 and VAX hardware and not Centurions, but... it might have given a different quirk of history.
That development environment is indeed terrible and awful. But if you give Ritchie and Thompson and Joy one of these for a few years...