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Apple ][e here, too. Except the screen I used was color. And, well, the machine wasn't really mine, it was the school's. But in 2nd grade, that was my first love.

I remember turning on the computer without inserting a floppy, and having it boot up to a "]". Typing anything would get me "SYNTAX ERROR".

I don't remember why I thought it was a programming prompt. Perhaps I asked somebody. In any case, I went to the elementary school's library and checked out the books for COBOL, Pascal and BASIC, and tried each one. Obviously, it turned out to be BASIC.

I got that machine to do things that amazed the other kids. In 3rd grade, I used the LINE statement to make it look like we were traveling through a 16-color tunnel. I even started tutoring one of the kids in the Autistically Impared department in BASIC. He took it farther on his own time, and showed me a thing or two.

The first computer my family owned was a Tandy RLX 1000. (I think its still up in the attic somewhere.) We first ran DOS, then Windows 3.1. (minus protected mode, of course.)

My brother and I then got to share an 8086 equipped with a 1200bps modem that we used to dial into a local BBS. We eventually got an upgrade to a 386 that we shared. (Complete with LANTastic. Woohoo!) I got it one day, he got it the next.

Eventually, we were each given a Pentium 75MHz to play with. We all shared an ISDN internet connection. Thus began my full-time addiction to computers and the Internet.

Oh, yeah: Make sure you enter in accurate info. They've never sold it off, so you don't need to worry. Email me to get validated. That'll give you a few days to try the system out...then consider paying via the Paypal link on their front page...

I used to volunteer there as the phone tech...they let me retain the access to validate new users.

We still meet weekly after almost 15 years. (The address on that page is incorrect. See this page for the correct address.)

We still meet weekly after almost 15 years. (The address on that page is incorrect. See this page for the correct address.)

WHOIS would be best shut down.

That's crazy. If someone's DNS server isn't retiring an old entry that puts my domain at an improper address, I want to be able to reach them with as little hassle as possible. Not demand contact information from my friends in Australia who pointed out that they couldn't get to my site.

(That's happened to me, BTW... www.grnet.com somehow ended up having an old DNS entry with a fubar'd expiration date, but only on a high-level machine in Australia.)

...and it may never be. I still help out at a dial-up ISP that's been open for business since 1989. We're a local mom and pop shop.

We have a lot of customers. There's seniors who don't do anything but email, so our "PAYING" rate works well, at $5 for 20 hours of connection time, tracked by the second. (Who'd have thought $5 could last you six months?) Then there's joe and jane parent who don't want their kid on Kazaa all the time.

All in all, dial-up still fills a niche. The low-bandwidth, low-cost niche. That's not going to be satisfied until there's datacount-based wireless service.

As the tech support for a small ISP, I'm usually referred to as "that nice {boy|man}" or "the help" depending on which customer you ask.

My bosses (two of them), when talking about me, refer to me as "my son," "our son" or "Mike." Makes sense, as we're just one small happy family.

But believe me, I hear ya. After serving as tech support for four years, I occasionally twitch when I hear the phone ring.

I work at an ISP as technical support. I've helped several people who don't read licenses, and several more who get defensive whenever I say, "I'm going to have to change a setting on your computer."

Millions of computer users assume that they own their computer, as well as everything on it. They don't understand the concept of software licensing, and most would probably (Strange, but true) give up using a computer if they discovered they didn't own everything on it.

The whole reason license agreements have become terrible for those of us who read them is because of the vast majority who don't. Software companies have an easy time adding clauses to their license agreements, because most people don't read them. It reaches a point where what people are agreeing to, and what they think they're agreeing to, become two separate animals.

If these were physical, handwritten contracts, there'd be all sorts of legal battles citing extortion, but, last I checked, there haven't been any competent lawyers arguing that extortion is possible online.

For reference, ask an old-time geek about GIF and the LZW patents.

I'd really like to see a business demigod declare that software-licensing can become restrictive enough to be considered a "cybercrime."

A good first step? Take two graphs, both of which would be "restrictivity vs usercount" contract comparison graphs. One graph would be for some highly competitive market (like loans or mortages), the other would be for major software products like office products.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to graphically represent the choices for initial software that people have when they buy their computers.

What sites are you visiting?

I'm willing to bet that the number of websites that work in Mozilla is directly proportional to the number of non-Microsoft products the user runs.

Since you're running one (or more) non-Microsoft product, you're more likely to be part of a culture that shuns Microsoft. People that run non-MS software are more likely to use websites that cater to tech-oriented crowd. And those websites are less likely to build their pages with proprietary FrontPage/IE extensions.

And just to show I'm not trolling:

I run Debian/testing on a P166 laptop, with X 3.3.6 and GNOME 1.4. When I'm away from that machine, I use SSH to get a terminal on it, and VNC to get a display. I also wrote a page on how to get it to work on that model laptop, and submitted it to Linux-Laptop.net. Think of that combination, and let me tell you I'm dedicated to OSS.

Indeed.

When a customer switches from AOL to us, it's never because of our prices, (which are low, compared to the other services available in the area), but because they got fed up with AOL's customer service.

Usually, they'd been with them for years, but when they started having problems, they'd discover AOL's customer service doesn't do much more than give away additional months of service as retainers.

We've never, ever had someone switch to us from AOL because they wanted more powerful access.

We affectionately call them "AOL refugees." :-)

I wonder why the clueless press does not do a wee bit of research and discover the obvious impotence of these "narrowed by argument" patents instead of issuing simple minded alarmist headlines proclaiming the "patenting of hyperlinking" controversy.

It's a cascade of a couple issues.

A media distribution point (television channel, newspaper, magazine) has to put out a great deal of information in order to maintain its viewership/readership. Journalists only have so much time to find a story, research it, put it together, and pass it on to their editor. In times of economic boom, (like the 90s,) there's plenty of money to go towards paying for writers and reporters. Now, there are fewer resources, fewer journalists, and less time for each journalist to put his story together.

That's why in the 90s everyone knew about the Microsoft antitrust case through television, but now only the really big newspapers (like the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or USA Today), or the specialized news services (Wired, The Register, Slashdot) have stories on these issues.

With the current economic drought, nobody's going to waste resources on stories that aren't the most newsworthy, or the simplest. The reporters at NYT and WP that do these stories are probably close to being laid off, as is.

Take it from me, I've held both levels of authority(writer, editor) at my old high school's paper, during well-staffed and understaffed times. I know what it's like to whip together a story in three or four hours.

If the only way to run the software is ..., and the software is mission-critical, then you've got no choice.

Jeez, that sounds like my parents and their embracement of M$ products with our family business and in our home.

I once tried to argue that Linux could be used for all the tasks that we perform, (smtp/pop3 email, BBS functionality, web hosting, Internet access w/ RADIUS) but they just looked at me and said,

"Microsoft only tries to make things better. You can't say that about a rogue OS without an owner."

(paraphrasing, but they did use all of those words at one point or another in that context. First sentence is a direct quote, though.)