What do you mean?!?!? The SR-56 was HIGHLY programmable, except the programming memory was non-volatile so you had to leave it powered on to retain your program, or punch it in again every time you turned it on.
When I graduated from High School and no longer had access to the teletypes in the 'computer room' at High School, and could no longer log onto the HP-1000 minicomputer, I went through withdrawls and the solution was to save my pennies (I believe I used some of the $$ from my HS graduation presents too) to buy an SR-56. It was the first time I owned something of my OWN that I could program. That is, if you don't include the Digi-Comp that I had years earlier.
The SR-52 was probably the first decent Texas Instruments calculator. I definitely couldn't afford one at the time. I had to make do with an SR-56. But then a few years later I got a HP-11c and sold the SR-56 to an instructor in tech school.
The SR-56 had one unique 'wart' that made it more useful: The Polar/Rectangular selector was a physical slide switch which was still active while the machine was running a program. So you could use it for a 'polled hardware interrupt' by using a trig function during your program and testing the result. This was by no means an immediate interrupt, but you could by thus means have your program break at specific points in a program, or change it's mode of operation without halting at all.
I can see what happened to NetBSD by simply looking at this screen as I type. It seems fine to me. Very usable, and once you know the system, it will seldom ever surprise you. The only ways that it changes is to gradually improve.
KDE vs. GNOME has been a schism issue for at least eight years now. It's not 'the current rift' in any sense of the word. It's an old, old issue, like vi versus emacs.
I would argue that Linux runs worse all the time on older hardware. Good independent apps get sucked into the big bloatware application frameworks, and cease being usable on plain old Linux with a standard set of X11 libraries. It happens all the time. And the 'desktop environments' continue to bloat outward, rather than just getting better.
I used to view Linux and OSS as a 'convergent' thing, where newer versions just got better and better, i.e. they would run better and faster on the same hardware. That's kinda fallen by the wayside. In part, because of the 'push to win the desktop whatever that means.
Essentially it amounts to huffing fumes from the Microsoft tailpipe all too often.
I can remember when even getting a command line in Linux on a laptop qualified you for Uber-Umaguma Geek status;
I can remember that, too. And I remember discovering back then that it was actually easier to install NetBSD than Linux on a laptop over an NFS share (laptop had no CDROM drive, which was common back in the day). I discovered something cool and new back then. The NetBSD kernel at that point had native compiled-in support for PCMCIA and PC Card NICs. With Linux you had to load an ugly 'side car' thing which was a real hassle.
But, then, the first time I experienced Linux was by inserting a boot floppy and booting a CD-ROM runtime version, in the fall of 1993 (kernel 0.99.something.) Also that first Yggdrasil release even played music out of the sound card at the startup. So there was a lot of coolness in the early times, too.
The only thing WordPerfect had going for it was the rich amount of tech support the company offered to Secretaries across the land. It was very EMPOWERING, we should say, for the 'guru' in each office who knew all the alt-control-flipperdoor-F4 and such key combinations to accomplish each task. It promoted an oligarchy of 'gurus' nationwide and let them feel important.
That's what WordPerfect was. It died when Truetype fonts came into being, BTW, because that deadweight of 'Wordperfect gurus' couldn't maintain their status of 'power' in the office when everybody got better, more graphical tools, but they clung to the feeling of power the old WordPerfect (which they were THE EXPERTS in using) gave them and essentially held it back long enough that the Windows version was never a success. WordPerfect was already near dead, BTW, when the Office 4.3 that I cited had come into being, so I was talking about a later period, when WordPerfect was already a rusty wreck.
I am far from a zealous Microsoft advocate these days, but the 'computers for the regular people' thing gelled bigtime with Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3. That's just history the way it was. You probably were still coding dBase stuff (or had you jumped on the 'Clipper' bandwagon) at that time.
The way it differs is that if you don't have any real substantial ideas to 'hypertext' together, you can glop together a whole buncha stuff with these new tools and cover up that fact.
My 'main' web page is still a bunch of linked-together html files that show pictures of our cats, mostly. But since it's about four years old now, there are cats who have passed on (two of them), a cat that is four years old is depicted as a tiny kitten, and the seven new cats we've since gotten (we have 11 in total now) aren't depicted at all.
Oh, and my '8088 Single Board Computer' project page, which is moving kinda slow yet.
(My.fvwm2rc is a slow moving beast, too. But it has stuff like xpdf, xcdroast and Midnight Command in it now.)
At least they're not completely 'facing inwards' like a lot of kids have been over the last decade or so. Sitting in a room running a disconnected game console is somewhat more alienating than all this 'link up and communicate' stuff, even though the 'communication' is largely just avatars interacting with avatars. (so to speak)
But for some reason, this newfangled web doesn't seem to appeal to me, my friends, or anyone I know.
I know where you're coming from. I'm a hardware geek from the word go, but my latest project (what I built this weekend) is a little black box with a PIC controller in it. One LED and a pushbutton. Basically, I'll be taking the box out with me to the back of the field where I have the apple trees planted and pressing the button on it. The LED blinks once per second for two minutes then ceases (the PIC goes to sleep.) I'll be using it to time how long (two minutes) to direct the water hose at each apple tree (it's been a dry year, I'm having to water each tree one at a time to keep them alive).
I suppose if I were more 'synergistic' and 'with it' I could write an active page on the web and carry a wireless PDA out with me when watering the trees and run the web app as my two minute timer. But my little PIC box uses two AAA batteries and is a completely independent stand-alone solution.
Or I could use a stopwatch, but my idea is that I want something non-numerical, so I can relax, hold the hose at each tree, and just monitor a blinkin' light to see when to move on to the next tree.
Since Intel is promoting it, it must be a way to chew up more processor time to get the same amount of information. And/or a way for us to chew up more processor time to get more, better, information.
One thing I can say for certain from my experience on certain 'blogs' where the admin is an 'active pages' enthusiast is that the stuff they do really, REALLY bogs down page loads. I browse the web using Seamonkey on an older P3 system running NetBSD. I've learned that bringing up certain sites in a tab can NOT be considered a background activity. (you can't even scroll around to read the page you're on while loading pages from said site)
So, as I was saying, I'm supposed to run out and spend the buck$ on a shiny new Intel processor. This P3 box isn't good enough. And Intel is in the forefront of making sure that continues to be more the case.
Yes, but you're talking about 'selling back to the grid' at that same time that everybody else on the grid, according to your reasoning, won't need the power, either. So either 'the grid' establishes some sort of centralized storage facility for power 'sold back' to it, or what you propose won't scale at all. When everybody is 'selling back to the grid' at times when nobody needs the power in their home, what's 'the grid' gonna do with the power? Obviously, they'll set differential rates based on time-of-day to compensate as more and more people get involved.
The population has leveled off in China because the dictatorship there has decreed that couples may only have one child each. It has little to do with the economy there 'booming.' The booming economy may, however, be a result of the 'one child' dictate. That's one of the benefits of the 'one child' policy that the government explicitly cites.
My point is there's no cause-effect relationship between the Chinese economy and the population. If any relationship exists, it is the reverse.
You're parroting a lot of dogma. And lining up an assortment of apples, orange, tomatos and melons, and making claims about which one was 'best' at the time.
All the OSes you cite had 'better' and 'worse' attributes depending on the need and the application. You're surely not going to claim there was a better office suite for Linux or Xenix back then than Office 4.3 for the 'doze?
You meant to type: "Just because you don't choose to consume most of your processor's overhead..."
I tried KDE a long time ago, when it heavily taxed my hardware (a 486 running Linux at the time- my main machine then) I've tried some of the 'new' desktop schemes since then. It seems like no matter what else can be said about Linux 'desktop schemes' their main purpose is to chew up whatever resources are thrown at them. It's NOT impressive. I guess it sells new hardware and that's partly the point.
You get a conglomerate that includes an uneven collection of software tools. Some of which are very, very good. But I wouldn't call it a 'software development suite.'
I certainly don't want to be in the category where I refer to other countries as 'shit holes.' What I advocate in the realm of international finance may show some things about me, but using terms like that shows something about you.
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What do you mean?!?!? The SR-56 was HIGHLY programmable, except the programming memory was non-volatile so you had to leave it powered on to retain your program, or punch it in again every time you turned it on.
When I graduated from High School and no longer had access to the teletypes in the 'computer room' at High School, and could no longer log onto the HP-1000 minicomputer, I went through withdrawls and the solution was to save my pennies (I believe I used some of the $$ from my HS graduation presents too) to buy an SR-56. It was the first time I owned something of my OWN that I could program. That is, if you don't include the Digi-Comp that I had years earlier.
The SR-52 was probably the first decent Texas Instruments calculator. I definitely couldn't afford one at the time. I had to make do with an SR-56. But then a few years later I got a HP-11c and sold the SR-56 to an instructor in tech school.
The SR-56 had one unique 'wart' that made it more useful: The Polar/Rectangular selector was a physical slide switch which was still active while the machine was running a program. So you could use it for a 'polled hardware interrupt' by using a trig function during your program and testing the result. This was by no means an immediate interrupt, but you could by thus means have your program break at specific points in a program, or change it's mode of operation without halting at all.
I sold most of my old HP calculators recently and bought an HP50g.
Yes, I know. Sacrilege, etc. etc.
It's not a bad machine.
PCMCIA was not on the 'net' boot disk.
Yes, in fact, it was. If you just stuck with NetBSD.
I can see what happened to NetBSD by simply looking at this screen as I type. It seems fine to me. Very usable, and once you know the system, it will seldom ever surprise you. The only ways that it changes is to gradually improve.
The Fountainhead is a far superior work. It isn't so didactic and preachy. Little in it feels like an overdone comic book.
KDE vs. GNOME has been a schism issue for at least eight years now. It's not 'the current rift' in any sense of the word. It's an old, old issue, like vi versus emacs.
I would argue that Linux runs worse all the time on older hardware. Good independent apps get sucked into the big bloatware application frameworks, and cease being usable on plain old Linux with a standard set of X11 libraries. It happens all the time. And the 'desktop environments' continue to bloat outward, rather than just getting better.
I used to view Linux and OSS as a 'convergent' thing, where newer versions just got better and better, i.e. they would run better and faster on the same hardware. That's kinda fallen by the wayside. In part, because of the 'push to win the desktop whatever that means.
Essentially it amounts to huffing fumes from the Microsoft tailpipe all too often.
OMG! They aren't seriously still be using 8049 family parts in production automobiles, I hope. That was a stunted architecture in 1986.
I can remember when even getting a command line in Linux on a laptop qualified you for Uber-Umaguma Geek status;
I can remember that, too. And I remember discovering back then that it was actually easier to install NetBSD than Linux on a laptop over an NFS share (laptop had no CDROM drive, which was common back in the day). I discovered something cool and new back then. The NetBSD kernel at that point had native compiled-in support for PCMCIA and PC Card NICs. With Linux you had to load an ugly 'side car' thing which was a real hassle.
But, then, the first time I experienced Linux was by inserting a boot floppy and booting a CD-ROM runtime version, in the fall of 1993 (kernel 0.99.something.) Also that first Yggdrasil release even played music out of the sound card at the startup. So there was a lot of coolness in the early times, too.
The only thing WordPerfect had going for it was the rich amount of tech support the company offered to Secretaries across the land. It was very EMPOWERING, we should say, for the 'guru' in each office who knew all the alt-control-flipperdoor-F4 and such key combinations to accomplish each task. It promoted an oligarchy of 'gurus' nationwide and let them feel important.
That's what WordPerfect was. It died when Truetype fonts came into being, BTW, because that deadweight of 'Wordperfect gurus' couldn't maintain their status of 'power' in the office when everybody got better, more graphical tools, but they clung to the feeling of power the old WordPerfect (which they were THE EXPERTS in using) gave them and essentially held it back long enough that the Windows version was never a success. WordPerfect was already near dead, BTW, when the Office 4.3 that I cited had come into being, so I was talking about a later period, when WordPerfect was already a rusty wreck.
I am far from a zealous Microsoft advocate these days, but the 'computers for the regular people' thing gelled bigtime with Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3. That's just history the way it was. You probably were still coding dBase stuff (or had you jumped on the 'Clipper' bandwagon) at that time.
Most of the apps I use are graphical. The thing is, I don't need to tie them together with a big wad of middleware GUI to get valuable use from them.
Some of us, you see, have better use for our processing cycles than as eye candy.
I've become a proponent of barges, traveling along a network of canals.
The way it differs is that if you don't have any real substantial ideas to 'hypertext' together, you can glop together a whole buncha stuff with these new tools and cover up that fact.
.fvwm2rc is a slow moving beast, too. But it has stuff like xpdf, xcdroast and Midnight Command in it now.)
My 'main' web page is still a bunch of linked-together html files that show pictures of our cats, mostly. But since it's about four years old now, there are cats who have passed on (two of them), a cat that is four years old is depicted as a tiny kitten, and the seven new cats we've since gotten (we have 11 in total now) aren't depicted at all.
Oh, and my '8088 Single Board Computer' project page, which is moving kinda slow yet.
(My
At least they're not completely 'facing inwards' like a lot of kids have been over the last decade or so. Sitting in a room running a disconnected game console is somewhat more alienating than all this 'link up and communicate' stuff, even though the 'communication' is largely just avatars interacting with avatars. (so to speak)
But for some reason, this newfangled web doesn't seem to appeal to me, my friends, or anyone I know.
I know where you're coming from. I'm a hardware geek from the word go, but my latest project (what I built this weekend) is a little black box with a PIC controller in it. One LED and a pushbutton. Basically, I'll be taking the box out with me to the back of the field where I have the apple trees planted and pressing the button on it. The LED blinks once per second for two minutes then ceases (the PIC goes to sleep.) I'll be using it to time how long (two minutes) to direct the water hose at each apple tree (it's been a dry year, I'm having to water each tree one at a time to keep them alive).
I suppose if I were more 'synergistic' and 'with it' I could write an active page on the web and carry a wireless PDA out with me when watering the trees and run the web app as my two minute timer. But my little PIC box uses two AAA batteries and is a completely independent stand-alone solution.
Or I could use a stopwatch, but my idea is that I want something non-numerical, so I can relax, hold the hose at each tree, and just monitor a blinkin' light to see when to move on to the next tree.
Since Intel is promoting it, it must be a way to chew up more processor time to get the same amount of information. And/or a way for us to chew up more processor time to get more, better, information.
One thing I can say for certain from my experience on certain 'blogs' where the admin is an 'active pages' enthusiast is that the stuff they do really, REALLY bogs down page loads. I browse the web using Seamonkey on an older P3 system running NetBSD. I've learned that bringing up certain sites in a tab can NOT be considered a background activity. (you can't even scroll around to read the page you're on while loading pages from said site)
So, as I was saying, I'm supposed to run out and spend the buck$ on a shiny new Intel processor. This P3 box isn't good enough. And Intel is in the forefront of making sure that continues to be more the case.
Yes, but you're talking about 'selling back to the grid' at that same time that everybody else on the grid, according to your reasoning, won't need the power, either. So either 'the grid' establishes some sort of centralized storage facility for power 'sold back' to it, or what you propose won't scale at all. When everybody is 'selling back to the grid' at times when nobody needs the power in their home, what's 'the grid' gonna do with the power? Obviously, they'll set differential rates based on time-of-day to compensate as more and more people get involved.
The population has leveled off in China because the dictatorship there has decreed that couples may only have one child each. It has little to do with the economy there 'booming.' The booming economy may, however, be a result of the 'one child' dictate. That's one of the benefits of the 'one child' policy that the government explicitly cites.
My point is there's no cause-effect relationship between the Chinese economy and the population. If any relationship exists, it is the reverse.
You're parroting a lot of dogma. And lining up an assortment of apples, orange, tomatos and melons, and making claims about which one was 'best' at the time.
All the OSes you cite had 'better' and 'worse' attributes depending on the need and the application. You're surely not going to claim there was a better office suite for Linux or Xenix back then than Office 4.3 for the 'doze?
You meant to type: "Just because you don't choose to consume most of your processor's overhead..."
I tried KDE a long time ago, when it heavily taxed my hardware (a 486 running Linux at the time- my main machine then) I've tried some of the 'new' desktop schemes since then. It seems like no matter what else can be said about Linux 'desktop schemes' their main purpose is to chew up whatever resources are thrown at them. It's NOT impressive. I guess it sells new hardware and that's partly the point.
You get a conglomerate that includes an uneven collection of software tools. Some of which are very, very good. But I wouldn't call it a 'software development suite.'
I certainly don't want to be in the category where I refer to other countries as 'shit holes.' What I advocate in the realm of international finance may show some things about me, but using terms like that shows something about you.
The license was Windows 98 ... six months before they EOLed it. I'm sure glad Thailand sold its soul for that six months of legality.
Windows 98 didn't become illegal after Microsoft EOL'ed it.