I used a MP2000 as my primary computer for almost two years. I was "commuting" between the US & UK and used it - along with a Ricochet (R.I.P.) in the US and Nokia cell PCMCIA card in the UK - for browsing, email, telnet (with PT100, killer app!), etc. So I was wireless when mobile, and on Ethernet when at a desk... All pre-802.11. This was circa 1997 BTW.
It was nice to carry virtually all my computing needs in a "daytimer" sized case. People bitch about the Newt's size, but compared to a circa-97 brick of a 7lb laptop? Is was VERY small.
To date the NewtOS was pobably the most elegant OS ever created... and I've run them all. The only thing it didn't do well, at least until now, was gaming. I played a lot of NewTRIS, and I seem to recall a snood, or snood-like game too but Newtgaming was limited to puzzles or very simple action games (like a sub depth-charging thing that I can't recall the name of)
I might have to charge it back up now and play some old NES game. =) Nice to see the Newt still breathing.
I knew (mind you, only via email) Michael Robertson well over 10 years ago (when he was "MR Mac Software")... And eventually I took over as "List Mom" for the mac-mgrs mailing list about 6 months after Michael stopped doing the job.
For almost two decades, the IT industry, in the form of corporate IT departments have been telling their masters:
"Invest in technology, and it will pay off in increased productivity and profits."
For the past 10+ years, the IT industry, in the form of software and hardware vendors, have seen their profits soar as a result of this investment, and developed the perfect mechanism for milking it for consistent, quarterly results:
The Upgrade.
The Upgrade has killed the golden goose. The consistent, repetitive costly upgrade... while padding the bottom line of IT Vendors, has eroded the bottom line of the Corporate World.
Increased expediture, planned and worse, ENFORCED obsolescence, ever-increasing headcounts, etc etc etc.
The CEO's and CFO's have had enough, and they aren't taking it anymore. From their perspective IT is a money pit. An endless drain on financial and human resources.
Ane we are wondering why the tech sector is stagnant at best right now? Technology is immature, yet we kept on praising it as the solution to all problems! Arrogance of our superiority and ignorance of true business needs were the dominant perceptions of your average IT department over the past decade or so. Now is the time for their revenge.
The holders of the purse strings want to see some of that return on investment before they'll spend like that again.
Our profession needs to learn humility, and nothing does that better than a financial ass-kicking.
Seriously: Has anyone ever been fired from Microsoft for writing insecure or buggy code? I don't think so.
I live and work near Redmond and know many Microserfs.... Both blue badges and permatemps. I've never heard any of them saying anything about anyone being fired for quality issues.
Sure there was the guy who offed himself in the 911 on highway 522 because he didn't get promoted (taking out some elderly tourists in a motor home as a bonus). Then there was the guy who stole/resold a few mil $$ worth of software that then died... of "mysterious causes."
But actually *FIRED*??? Not yet.
I think that would be a great motivator to assist "Trustworthy Computing" to live up to its name. Take the bozos responsible for the latest RPC vulnerabilities and FIRE the whole damn group in a very public fashion. Of course a public execution would be even better, but Microsoft doesn't have *that* much political clout here in Washington State. I'm sure the current administration in "the other Washington" would allow it under some provision of the Patriot Act, but as far as I know, only Boeing and the penitentiary in Walla Walla have the authority to actually kill people around here.
C'mon Ballmer! Live up to your promise and SACK SOMEBODY NOW!
Content profitability in a comfortable niche market.
Too long have people labored under the delusion that one company MUST dominate the "computer market"... only because one company (Microsoft) seemingly *has* dominated. Just because one does today, doesn't mean that is the natural order of the market place. If anything it is unsustainable, as Microsoft is beginning to find out.
Sun makes some excellent high end gear, and in that market niche they are by far the largest player. They aren't even competeing with M$ in that space... and there is plenty of money to be made there. Sure CEO Jeff won't get to cross-check Bill in the teeth as often as he'd really like, but hey... that is NOT what Sun is in business to do.
Shake the current "one must dominate" worldview out of your heads/.'ers. It won't work. Microsoft's whole strategy, both internally and externally, is "For us to win, they have to lose." You WILL lose if you play that game with Microsoft because they play it better than anybody... but if you play a different game... Steve Jobs' game... where "we need to make something of quality that some percentage of the market wants and not worry about Microsoft" then you will do fine. There are billions of dollars to be had and significant percentages of market to be owned. Sure, you won't have dominance, but you don't really *need* it.
Maybe Apple was right with their (globally lambasted) "Lemmings" super bowl ad in 1985. Business just blindly walked off the cliff and right into Gates/Ballmers' bank accounts.
Of course I suspect if history had been different and we'd all ended up buying Apple's the result would not be that different. We'd have a Steve Jobs/Borg head icon instead perhaps. =)
At least we didn't all buy Amigas... then we'd all have to off ourselves for being such bleating wankers.
Shouldn't this be a "Trash" patent, not a "Garbage" one?
But hey, this *is* innovative as it now pops up from the bottom (or left, or right) side of the screen and annoyingly jumps around as you try and drag stuff to it... unlike that pesky "fixed on the dessktop" Trash of the pre-OS X era... which of course Microsoft ripped off. take something perfectly usable and change it to be less so.
Especially when I am hiring. I learn more about people and companies via Google than via resume's and marketing-heavy websites.
Granted, I take everything I read on the Internet* with a grain of salt, but information, no matter the source, is helpful in decision making.
*Even/.! For example, the "selfish routing" story from last week. Anyone who knows BGP4 knows that article, and 99% of the comments about it were unalduterated and misinformed BS.
The point of the article was that, no matter how good or bad your product is, or how firmly entrenched you monopoly may be, if you piss off your customers long enough, you will eventually strangle yourself to death.
In 1995 I had flat rate, all I could eat, ubiquitous (at least in the cities I lived in/travelled to the most: Seattle, SF, NYC), wireless Internet access.
Since the death of that network (Ricochet) I have used other wireless networks (GSM, CDMA, CDPD, etc.) and what made me quit using them very swiftly was the usage-based pay scheme.
You see the problem is that wireless communications are flaky. I know that about half of my voice calls on wireless devices are lousy and/or dropped... data communications is nowhere near as flexible and tolerant of lousy connections as the human ear is. At least I can kind of guess that my wife wants me to stop... the.... groc... some... milk...and... thing... dinner.
But my computer/PDA/smartphone/whatever, when presented with a datastream like that would just give up... and try again, and again, and again... at whatever cents per minute? Fsck that. I hate paying for something on a metered basis that just *doesn't work.*
If they came up with a plan that was unlimited, for say $29.95 a month? (what I was paying for ricochet BTW) Sure, I'd buy it. But metered? Forget it.
Let me describe my first encounter with Monsoons and you will grok how good they are.
I was at MacWorld Expo about 3 years ago, walking back to our booth in Moscone's North Hall, we were in the "Net Pavillion" in the NW Corner and the "Multimedia' (pasee term nowadays!) area was right in front of us. As I walked by Sorensen's booth they had all these brand new Apple Cinema Displays showing off their wares. They were playing movie trailers in full-screen mode. The gorgeous monitors caught my eye and I was reeled in like a fish toward a 20"+ widescreen showing some special effects shots from "Pearl Harbor" (the unreleased)... from 50' away, the monitors drew me in, but when I was drawn past the 20' mark my attention was grabbed by a different source... the awesome sound
Mind you, that may not be impressive, until you realize that a crowded show floor of Moscone Center is probably the worst acoustical environment on earth!
Anyway, my mind completely popped the sexy Cinema Displays right off the stack as my focus narrowed, like a laser, on the incredible speakers. I had to have them. I spent the rest of the expo trying to find some to buy. I finally did, and now I have them all over my house and carry my iPod from room to room plugging into my Monsoons.
It is also a 10+ year old 66Mhz PPC 601. That is more likely the issue as opposed to the fact that it has fruit on the front.
In fact a server with fruit on the front in the same facility servers this high traffic site, and another here also runs the voter info site for Washigton state... and it pulls in well over 5 million hits on election night.
Webserving doesn't take that much horsepower if the CGI's and databases are absent or minimal. Of course if you could tap the horsepower consumed by pinheaded Linux ditto-heads bashing single-button mice and other Macintosh-isms you could probably power a mid-size city for a few months.
We are the facility that houses the TidBITs servers, and yes, they run on Macs... *really old* macs at that. I have been personally bugging Adam to upgrade for months, if not years, to better hardware and OS X. I actually called him last summer to try and include him on a volume purchase of Xserves... But he really loves that old PowerMacintosh 7100(!)... yes, their server was built when most of you/.'ers were still in single-digit grades and clutching your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle backpacks. How many other 66Mhz webservers are still out there dishing out several hundred thousand hits a week?
BTW: we are the largest Mac (but not exclusively so) hosting & colo facility on the planet. Here are some pics on my server.... and yes, it is an old Mac too. =)
I'll probably post an MRTG graph there later today of their traffic volume.
The reason I haven't switched over to OS X? Believe it or not, there's only one reason: that stupid Open File dialog. I can't grok it, I can't figure it out, and worst of all I can't just type in the first few letters of the file I want in the folder and have it be selected, as has been the case since Mac OS 6.x (back when it was just called "System 6")
That particular feature did not appear in the OS until System 7, in 1991/2. There was an INIT/CDEV for System 6 called "Boomerang" that lent similar functionality, but it was a shareware add-on.
Murphy's revenge: The more reliable you make a system, the longer it will take you to figure out what's wrong when it breaks.
-- Sean Donelan on NANOG, Mon, 26 Nov 2001 06:28:22 -0500 (EST)
I use variations of it verbally in meetings when the marketing/sales pinheads are demanding absurd uptimes for brochureware websites. It makes a great starting point for those "be careful what you wish for, because you will have to pay the bill" talks that I use like Jedi mind tricks on pinhead marketing and sales weasels.
I strongly support this for my kids
on
Games in High School?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So much so I donated web hosting to the organization mentioned below!
In fact I agree with the 'keeps them off the streets' idea, though I feel that in reality it is more about teaching them to be comfortable with technology. My two boys go to a local Boys and Girls Club after school. They have a nice computer lab and I know my kids play game there (AoE, *Tychoon, etc.) Strategy gaming is a good thing for developing minds. I played my share of "Risk", "Pente", "Battleship" and the like in my youth, I see nothing different about Age of Empires or Civ. My sons also play chess & Risk (both analog!) on occasion too, so it is not all about technology. These "games" are really just a training ground on how to use strategy and tactics to solve an artificial problem... once the problems get real those mental muscles will have been trained. Such skills come in handy in every profession, not just the military.
If your answer is wage slave, pick a major inline with you immediate skills.
If your answer is leader, pick something on a tangent.
I run Operations for a hosting/colo facility. My staff is made up of English Lit, Theater, Music, Business, and yeah a few Engineering degrees. I prefer to pick people from varied backgrounds and educations, why? Their minds are *trained* to be open. They have seen and experienced more than any one-track geek ever will. They have even dated members of the opposite sex! For them technology is both a passion and a career.. it is not however, their life. Nothing is better in the long run for a manager than their staff having a life, especially one that gets them away from work.
As the company grows, my current staff will be the leaders of the next generation of employees... and unlike a one-track geek, they will have the breadth of experience to be leaders.
As for my degree? Bachelor of Fine Arts of course. =) Having graduated in 1985, I was well-placed to ride the wave of technology (PostScript, PageMaker, etc.) that completely transformed my profession between 1986 and 1995.
Fool you once... shame on you!
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 1
This is the same site that was predicting the "iWalk" before the "iPod" was released. Note the date (10-23-2001) on the above URL.
Never believe the Mac 'rumour sites' they rarely get it right. Except for the 'night before the keynote' in the past when leaks showed up from the show-floor setup folks. Perhaps this is why the keynote was moved up a day. I have heard show floor setup security will be very tight. No vendor is allowed on the floor to setup until after the keynote starts, except Apple of course.
1. Don't be in a rush to become your Dad. Wageslavery sucks. Smart people spend their late teens/early 20s drinking and sleeping around. It is called College!
2. Don't assume you know everything. Nobody does. People who think they do get "automatically hated" by everyone else, no matter what their age. Why? because it is annoying as hell.
3. Don't be in a rush to be your Dad. Marriage sucks. Smart people spend their twenties and early thirties sleeping around. People who marry young are idiots... but they don't realize that until they are in their 40's. See #1.
4. Don't be in a rush to be your Dad. Parenthood sucks. Smart people wait until they are finincially OK before they begin reproducing. Nothing drains your coffers faster than mouths to feed. See #1 & 3.
My NeXT machines still run thank you. When they stop running I will mount them on the wall to be appreciated for the artworks they truly are. The innards, and case of the NeXTstation ('slab') machines were the most elegantly engineered computers ever created. The average 'PC' is a Rube Goldberg contraption in comparison.
The guy who toasted these machines is a philistine akin to the Taliban and their dynamite.
Slashdot Mirror
I used a MP2000 as my primary computer for almost two years. I was "commuting" between the US & UK and used it - along with a Ricochet (R.I.P.) in the US and Nokia cell PCMCIA card in the UK - for browsing, email, telnet (with PT100, killer app!), etc. So I was wireless when mobile, and on Ethernet when at a desk... All pre-802.11. This was circa 1997 BTW.
It was nice to carry virtually all my computing needs in a "daytimer" sized case. People bitch about the Newt's size, but compared to a circa-97 brick of a 7lb laptop? Is was VERY small.
To date the NewtOS was pobably the most elegant OS ever created... and I've run them all. The only thing it didn't do well, at least until now, was gaming. I played a lot of NewTRIS, and I seem to recall a snood, or snood-like game too but Newtgaming was limited to puzzles or very simple action games (like a sub depth-charging thing that I can't recall the name of)
I might have to charge it back up now and play some old NES game. =) Nice to see the Newt still breathing.
May have to replace your(?) face with another.
Might I suggest Michael Robertson? [lindows.com]
Now that's ironic!
I knew (mind you, only via email) Michael Robertson well over 10 years ago (when he was "MR Mac Software")... And eventually I took over as "List Mom" for the mac-mgrs mailing list about 6 months after Michael stopped doing the job.
Small world.
...I never did this.
Ever.
No, really... I didn't.
A blog entry (not mine) on the subject.
Enjoy.
For almost two decades, the IT industry, in the form of corporate IT departments have been telling their masters:
"Invest in technology, and it will pay off in increased productivity and profits."
For the past 10+ years, the IT industry, in the form of software and hardware vendors, have seen their profits soar as a result of this investment, and developed the perfect mechanism for milking it for consistent, quarterly results: The Upgrade.
The Upgrade has killed the golden goose. The consistent, repetitive costly upgrade... while padding the bottom line of IT Vendors, has eroded the bottom line of the Corporate World.
Increased expediture, planned and worse, ENFORCED obsolescence, ever-increasing headcounts, etc etc etc.
The CEO's and CFO's have had enough, and they aren't taking it anymore. From their perspective IT is a money pit. An endless drain on financial and human resources.
Ane we are wondering why the tech sector is stagnant at best right now? Technology is immature, yet we kept on praising it as the solution to all problems! Arrogance of our superiority and ignorance of true business needs were the dominant perceptions of your average IT department over the past decade or so. Now is the time for their revenge.
The holders of the purse strings want to see some of that return on investment before they'll spend like that again.
Our profession needs to learn humility, and nothing does that better than a financial ass-kicking.
Seriously: Has anyone ever been fired from Microsoft for writing insecure or buggy code? I don't think so.
I live and work near Redmond and know many Microserfs.... Both blue badges and permatemps. I've never heard any of them saying anything about anyone being fired for quality issues.
Sure there was the guy who offed himself in the 911 on highway 522 because he didn't get promoted (taking out some elderly tourists in a motor home as a bonus). Then there was the guy who stole/resold a few mil $$ worth of software that then died... of "mysterious causes."
But actually *FIRED*??? Not yet.
I think that would be a great motivator to assist "Trustworthy Computing" to live up to its name. Take the bozos responsible for the latest RPC vulnerabilities and FIRE the whole damn group in a very public fashion. Of course a public execution would be even better, but Microsoft doesn't have *that* much political clout here in Washington State. I'm sure the current administration in "the other Washington" would allow it under some provision of the Patriot Act, but as far as I know, only Boeing and the penitentiary in Walla Walla have the authority to actually kill people around here.
C'mon Ballmer! Live up to your promise and SACK SOMEBODY NOW!
Too long have people labored under the delusion that one company MUST dominate the "computer market"... only because one company (Microsoft) seemingly *has* dominated. Just because one does today, doesn't mean that is the natural order of the market place. If anything it is unsustainable, as Microsoft is beginning to find out.
Sun makes some excellent high end gear, and in that market niche they are by far the largest player. They aren't even competeing with M$ in that space... and there is plenty of money to be made there. Sure CEO Jeff won't get to cross-check Bill in the teeth as often as he'd really like, but hey... that is NOT what Sun is in business to do.
Shake the current "one must dominate" worldview out of your heads /.'ers. It won't work. Microsoft's whole strategy, both internally and externally, is "For us to win, they have to lose." You WILL lose if you play that game with Microsoft because they play it better than anybody... but if you play a different game... Steve Jobs' game... where "we need to make something of quality that some percentage of the market wants and not worry about Microsoft" then you will do fine. There are billions of dollars to be had and significant percentages of market to be owned. Sure, you won't have dominance, but you don't really *need* it.
Maybe Apple was right with their (globally lambasted) "Lemmings" super bowl ad in 1985. Business just blindly walked off the cliff and right into Gates/Ballmers' bank accounts.
Of course I suspect if history had been different and we'd all ended up buying Apple's the result would not be that different. We'd have a Steve Jobs/Borg head icon instead perhaps. =)
At least we didn't all buy Amigas... then we'd all have to off ourselves for being such bleating wankers.
heh.
But hey, this *is* innovative as it now pops up from the bottom (or left, or right) side of the screen and annoyingly jumps around as you try and drag stuff to it... unlike that pesky "fixed on the dessktop" Trash of the pre-OS X era... which of course Microsoft ripped off. take something perfectly usable and change it to be less so.
yawn.
Especially when I am hiring. I learn more about people and companies via Google than via resume's and marketing-heavy websites.
Granted, I take everything I read on the Internet* with a grain of salt, but information, no matter the source, is helpful in decision making.
*Even /.! For example, the "selfish routing" story from last week. Anyone who knows BGP4 knows that article, and 99% of the comments about it were unalduterated and misinformed BS.
So, how does that explain Quark, Inc.?
In 1995 I had flat rate, all I could eat, ubiquitous (at least in the cities I lived in/travelled to the most: Seattle, SF, NYC), wireless Internet access.
Since the death of that network (Ricochet) I have used other wireless networks (GSM, CDMA, CDPD, etc.) and what made me quit using them very swiftly was the usage-based pay scheme.
You see the problem is that wireless communications are flaky. I know that about half of my voice calls on wireless devices are lousy and/or dropped... data communications is nowhere near as flexible and tolerant of lousy connections as the human ear is. At least I can kind of guess that my wife wants me to stop ... the .... groc... some... milk ...and... thing... dinner.
But my computer/PDA/smartphone/whatever, when presented with a datastream like that would just give up... and try again, and again, and again... at whatever cents per minute? Fsck that. I hate paying for something on a metered basis that just *doesn't work.*
If they came up with a plan that was unlimited, for say $29.95 a month? (what I was paying for ricochet BTW) Sure, I'd buy it. But metered? Forget it.
I was at MacWorld Expo about 3 years ago, walking back to our booth in Moscone's North Hall, we were in the "Net Pavillion" in the NW Corner and the "Multimedia' (pasee term nowadays!) area was right in front of us. As I walked by Sorensen's booth they had all these brand new Apple Cinema Displays showing off their wares. They were playing movie trailers in full-screen mode. The gorgeous monitors caught my eye and I was reeled in like a fish toward a 20"+ widescreen showing some special effects shots from "Pearl Harbor" (the unreleased)... from 50' away, the monitors drew me in, but when I was drawn past the 20' mark my attention was grabbed by a different source... the awesome sound
Mind you, that may not be impressive, until you realize that a crowded show floor of Moscone Center is probably the worst acoustical environment on earth!
Anyway, my mind completely popped the sexy Cinema Displays right off the stack as my focus narrowed, like a laser, on the incredible speakers. I had to have them. I spent the rest of the expo trying to find some to buy. I finally did, and now I have them all over my house and carry my iPod from room to room plugging into my Monsoons.
Monsoons Rock.
It is also a 10+ year old 66Mhz PPC 601. That is more likely the issue as opposed to the fact that it has fruit on the front.
In fact a server with fruit on the front in the same facility servers this high traffic site, and another here also runs the voter info site for Washigton state... and it pulls in well over 5 million hits on election night.
Webserving doesn't take that much horsepower if the CGI's and databases are absent or minimal. Of course if you could tap the horsepower consumed by pinheaded Linux ditto-heads bashing single-button mice and other Macintosh-isms you could probably power a mid-size city for a few months.
BTW: we are the largest Mac (but not exclusively so) hosting & colo facility on the planet. Here are some pics on my server.... and yes, it is an old Mac too. =)
I'll probably post an MRTG graph there later today of their traffic volume.
That particular feature did not appear in the OS until System 7, in 1991/2. There was an INIT/CDEV for System 6 called "Boomerang" that lent similar functionality, but it was a shareware add-on.
Well, Duh! In a computer ya doofus! Where else would a computer company use a new CPU?
They sure as hell ain't dropping it into an iPod of some vaporPDA!
Nobody has a "Class A/B/C" address range anymore... They have a
The Net stopped using Classfull addressing almost 10 years ago. Get with the program folks!
It is in my random
Murphy's revenge: The more reliable you make a system, the longer it will take you to figure out what's wrong when it breaks. -- Sean Donelan on NANOG, Mon, 26 Nov 2001 06:28:22 -0500 (EST)
I use variations of it verbally in meetings when the marketing/sales pinheads are demanding absurd uptimes for brochureware websites. It makes a great starting point for those "be careful what you wish for, because you will have to pay the bill" talks that I use like Jedi mind tricks on pinhead marketing and sales weasels.
So much so I donated web hosting to the organization mentioned below!
In fact I agree with the 'keeps them off the streets' idea, though I feel that in reality it is more about teaching them to be comfortable with technology. My two boys go to a local Boys and Girls Club after school. They have a nice computer lab and I know my kids play game there (AoE, *Tychoon, etc.) Strategy gaming is a good thing for developing minds. I played my share of "Risk", "Pente", "Battleship" and the like in my youth, I see nothing different about Age of Empires or Civ. My sons also play chess & Risk (both analog!) on occasion too, so it is not all about technology. These "games" are really just a training ground on how to use strategy and tactics to solve an artificial problem... once the problems get real those mental muscles will have been trained. Such skills come in handy in every profession, not just the military.
--chuck goolsbee, VP, digital.forest
If your answer is leader, pick something on a tangent.
I run Operations for a hosting/colo facility. My staff is made up of English Lit, Theater, Music, Business, and yeah a few Engineering degrees. I prefer to pick people from varied backgrounds and educations, why? Their minds are *trained* to be open. They have seen and experienced more than any one-track geek ever will. They have even dated members of the opposite sex! For them technology is both a passion and a career.. it is not however, their life. Nothing is better in the long run for a manager than their staff having a life, especially one that gets them away from work.
As the company grows, my current staff will be the leaders of the next generation of employees.
As for my degree? Bachelor of Fine Arts of course. =) Having graduated in 1985, I was well-placed to ride the wave of technology (PostScript, PageMaker, etc.) that completely transformed my profession between 1986 and 1995.
This is the same site that was predicting the "iWalk" before the "iPod" was released.
Note the date (10-23-2001) on the above URL.
Never believe the Mac 'rumour sites' they rarely get it right. Except for the 'night before the keynote' in the past when leaks showed up from the show-floor setup folks. Perhaps this is why the keynote was moved up a day. I have heard show floor setup security will be very tight. No vendor is allowed on the floor to setup until after the keynote starts, except Apple of course.
1. Don't be in a rush to become your Dad. Wageslavery sucks. Smart people spend their late teens/early 20s drinking and sleeping around. It is called College!
2. Don't assume you know everything. Nobody does. People who think they do get "automatically hated" by everyone else, no matter what their age. Why? because it is annoying as hell.
3. Don't be in a rush to be your Dad. Marriage sucks. Smart people spend their twenties and early thirties sleeping around. People who marry young are idiots... but they don't realize that until they are in their 40's. See #1.
4. Don't be in a rush to be your Dad. Parenthood sucks. Smart people wait until they are finincially OK before they begin reproducing. Nothing drains your coffers faster than mouths to feed. See #1 & 3.
--old wise fart
My NeXT machines still run thank you. When they stop running I will mount them on the wall to be appreciated for the artworks they truly are. The innards, and case of the NeXTstation ('slab') machines were the most elegantly engineered computers ever created. The average 'PC' is a Rube Goldberg contraption in comparison.
The guy who toasted these machines is a philistine akin to the Taliban and their dynamite.