It's the GUI that America Online first used for their DOS client (ever heard of AOL?), and it was one of the most easy-to-use GUIs ever made for the PC platform.
The MacOS was first released in 1984, and it was a fairly easy-to-use environment from the start.
Many early Mac users were nontechnical people.
Windows 1.0 came out in 1986, but Windows didn't start becoming popular until Windows 3.0 in 1990, and at that point people still had to deal with DOS memory managers and AUTOEXEC.BAT/CIONFIG.SYS files.
That gave the Mac a *HUGE* head start, and it was at a point in 1984 in ease-of-use terms that Windows didn't approack (arguably) until the Windows NT release in 1993.
Windows wasn't even the first "easy to use" GUI environment on the x86 platform. See my other comments about PC/GEOS (GeoWorks Ensemble).
GeoWorks Ensemble was *LIGHT YEARS* ahead of Windows in terms of ease of use in the early 1990's. It even had customizable user levels which give newcomers a simpler experience while allowing advanced users to enable all of the bells and whistles in the included applications.
The classic MacOS was easier in most respects -- the installation of device drivers (control panels and extensions) was a drag-and-drop operation, and all programs came with a standard installer. And no, it wasn't more expensive -- a number of my friends back then used Macs, as did schools, and the benefits were well worth the price.
There's a reason most experiences technical people (and most experienced PC people) hold Microsoft in contempt -- we've actually used competing products, and we know how Windows actually stacks up. It's been a mediocre competitor at best in terms of features and ease of use -- the main reason it dominates is due to the illegal practices that Microsoft was *convicted* for.
Wow... I miss Shakey's Pizza. The Shakey's Pizza Parlor that was in Minnetonka, MN just west of Hwy 7 and 494 is the first place I ever saw a video arcade machine -- a pong game!:-)
I was perfectly happy when I was working at Unisys and at Northwest Airlines, but economic conditions created a mass layoff situation in both instances.
Were it not for the layoffs, I'd probably still be working there.
If the tracks I'm interested in were only released on vinyl and the vinyl in question were a limited or local album or single release, the probability of that item being available through licensed means except in the hands of a collector is fairly low.
It's the music industry equivalent of abandonware.
Sometimes laws are unjust, outdated, or simply incorrect, and I think we as individuals have the right to make that determination for ourselves.
Smaller groups of people with specialized needs tend to be ignored a lot by large ecommercial developers.
That's one of the reasons that the open source and shareware development communities came into being in the first place -- too many needs weren't being addressed by the Big Guys.
Ignoring the pointless insults present in your response, you do have a point -- there are a number of streaming audio resources on the net which are commonly (if erroneously) called "internet radio", and which can certainly provide a convenient and often highly-customizable method for previewing commonly-available music.
If you think that's the best available answer to all music-hunting problems, however, I've got a nice Microsoft OS here to sell ya...
Radio is random. You have no control over what most radio stations play, many stations don't tell you what the tracks are that they're playing, and the chances of something obscure of specific coming up on the play list at the precise time that you're listening is fairly low.
TA's music was great. It would change as the action changed, and really big battles seems to result in really cool orchestral numbers blasting out of the speakers.
Homeworld's music really seemed to add to the atmosphere. Not just the stuff that Yes wrote for the game, but the spooky space sounds and stuff made things seem really empty and echoey and kinda peaceful...until those damned enemy destroyers popped up out of nowhere and started splashing my harvesters with those big deathray things! Die, die, you bastards! Clickclickclickclick!:-)
We had a TTY 33 (actually two of them in a soundproof booth) at my high school in Hopkins, Minnesota (Lindbergh Flyers!), and each of them used a 110 baud accoustic modem to connect to various timesharing systems.
MERITSS. T.I.E.S. MIRJE. But by far the most entertaining one we could dial into (at least without getting into trouble) was the MECC Timesharing System, or MTS.
During my high school years between 1978 and 1981, I was introduced to such concepts as:
* E-mail between people located in geographically diverse areas (well, as far north as Hibbing and Duluth MN and as far sound as Rochester MN).
* Real-time chat programs with multiple channels, and some of them with fanciness like built-in dice rollers for RPG use.
* COMBAT!! MU,COMBAT,USMK001 or MU,CCOMBAT,USMK031 brought you into a world where everyone was piloting a ship with a single laser and a pair of missle tubes, and where folks would type in arcane commands like "L2000 M2 M2", peer at the scrolling yellow paper, and check their stopwatches for the magic time when the missles reloaded and the laser was cool enough to fire again.
* Karnath! Multiuser dungeoning at its best.
* Programming! BASIC, Fortran (MUMNF), and other fun things.
What a blast. My introduction to the BBS world and Fido/RIME/I'Link a decade or so later was a lot of fun as well, but timesharing systems are where I really began to appreciate the things that could be done with computer systems...
>>>PWANG<<< MISSILE HIT FROM SHIP #2 ON SHIELD #2 CAUSED 17% DAMAGE. >>>PWANG<<< MISSILE HIT FROM SHIP #2 ON SHIELD #2 CAUSED 34% DAMAGE. ***BLAM*** LASER HIT FROM SHIP #2 ON SHIELD #2 CAUSED 49% DAMAGE. YOUR SHIP HAS BEEN DESTROYED.
When I screw up, though, I have to use the fallback version (latest stable).
Still, it's fun to test it in this way. Eating my own dogfood and all that makes it more obvious when I decide to shoot myself in the foot, or head.:-)
Anyone can spend money, and I'm quite aware of the many things that they're supposedly working on, but why aren't we seeing any real benefit in the Microsoft products that we're actually using on a day-to-day basis?
It's one thing to work on pie-in-the-sky research (and I have no problem with that), but quite another to do that while also continuing to maintain one of the most problematic computing platforms in history in an almost unchanged state for over a decade.
Some of the money might be better spent researching things like Linux Capabilities, a feature that the mainframe OSes I play^H^H^H^Hwork on for a living have had for a number of decades now.
I mean, UNIVAC boxes and VAXen both had the concept of a permissions bitmask down over 20 years ago, so what the heck is Microsoft's problem? Too expensive to implement? I think not...
Four years is a very long time in some contexts, and a flash in the pan in others. As a Linux hobbyist and Unisys (Sperry/UNIVAC) OS2200 programmer, I can appreciate both extremes.:-)
My web site is hand-coded and intended to be lynx friendly. No fancy flash animations, I'm afraid...
Maybe that's because Microsoft has demonstrated that a technology company doesn't have to engage in any original work at all in order to be wildly successful, at least in the current US legal climate...
Slashdot Mirror
It's the GUI that America Online first used for their DOS client (ever heard of AOL?), and it was one of the most easy-to-use GUIs ever made for the PC platform.
The MacOS was first released in 1984, and it was a fairly easy-to-use environment from the start.
Many early Mac users were nontechnical people.
Windows 1.0 came out in 1986, but Windows didn't start becoming popular until Windows 3.0 in 1990, and at that point people still had to deal with DOS memory managers and AUTOEXEC.BAT/CIONFIG.SYS files.
That gave the Mac a *HUGE* head start, and it was at a point in 1984 in ease-of-use terms that Windows didn't approack (arguably) until the Windows NT release in 1993.
Windows wasn't even the first "easy to use" GUI environment on the x86 platform. See my other comments about PC/GEOS (GeoWorks Ensemble).
GeoWorks Ensemble was *LIGHT YEARS* ahead of Windows in terms of ease of use in the early 1990's. It even had customizable user levels which give newcomers a simpler experience while allowing advanced users to enable all of the bells and whistles in the included applications.
The classic MacOS was easier in most respects -- the installation of device drivers (control panels and extensions) was a drag-and-drop operation, and all programs came with a standard installer. And no, it wasn't more expensive -- a number of my friends back then used Macs, as did schools, and the benefits were well worth the price.
There's a reason most experiences technical people (and most experienced PC people) hold Microsoft in contempt -- we've actually used competing products, and we know how Windows actually stacks up. It's been a mediocre competitor at best in terms of features and ease of use -- the main reason it dominates is due to the illegal practices that Microsoft was *convicted* for.
Wow... I miss Shakey's Pizza. The Shakey's Pizza Parlor that was in Minnetonka, MN just west of Hwy 7 and 494 is the first place I ever saw a video arcade machine -- a pong game! :-)
TA lacked a storyline, but frankly it didn't need one, and it *still* has the best and most consistent interface I've seen in an RTS.
:-(
If only Blizzard and others would take a serious look at it and actually IMPLEMENT some of its ideas...
Or Space Invaders? Those two were HUGE in the early days of video arcades.
:-) :-)
I agree with others that Lode Runner and Elite should have been there, as well as The Sims.
Where was Sopwith??
I was perfectly happy when I was working at Unisys and at Northwest Airlines, but economic conditions created a mass layoff situation in both instances.
Were it not for the layoffs, I'd probably still be working there.
If the tracks I'm interested in were only released on vinyl and the vinyl in question were a limited or local album or single release, the probability of that item being available through licensed means except in the hands of a collector is fairly low.
It's the music industry equivalent of abandonware.
Sometimes laws are unjust, outdated, or simply incorrect, and I think we as individuals have the right to make that determination for ourselves.
Smaller groups of people with specialized needs tend to be ignored a lot by large ecommercial developers.
That's one of the reasons that the open source and shareware development communities came into being in the first place -- too many needs weren't being addressed by the Big Guys.
Ignoring the pointless insults present in your response, you do have a point -- there are a number of streaming audio resources on the net which are commonly (if erroneously) called "internet radio", and which can certainly provide a convenient and often highly-customizable method for previewing commonly-available music.
If you think that's the best available answer to all music-hunting problems, however, I've got a nice Microsoft OS here to sell ya...
Radio is random. You have no control over what most radio stations play, many stations don't tell you what the tracks are that they're playing, and the chances of something obscure of specific coming up on the play list at the precise time that you're listening is fairly low.
While it doesn't come with source, it does let folks use the GeoManager under DOS.
I've been finding myself using GVFM more and more under DOS, too (a DOS GUI file manager in the style of Windows Explorer).
Some languages are interpreted at the source level.
Some are "compiled" into p-code and that p-code is then interpreted later on.
Some are compiled into machine code and run directly by the hardware.
I consider the first two to be "scripting languages" in most cases.
Isn't that Microsoft's goal -- to ensure that cookie cutter desktop software solutions tailored for "the average PC user" are ubiquitous?
The people who seem the most unhappy with Microsoft solutions are the technically sophisticated users and those users who have specialized needs.
Why is that, exactly?
Maybe bland production-line shrinkwrapped software solutions really aren't the best fit for everyone?
Virtual PC even used to run natively under OS/2, for gosh sakes. :-)
http://bityard.com/article.php?sid=100#Adds
TA's music was great. It would change as the action changed, and really big battles seems to result in really cool orchestral numbers blasting out of the speakers.
:-)
Homeworld's music really seemed to add to the atmosphere. Not just the stuff that Yes wrote for the game, but the spooky space sounds and stuff made things seem really empty and echoey and kinda peaceful...until those damned enemy destroyers popped up out of nowhere and started splashing my harvesters with those big deathray things! Die, die, you bastards! Clickclickclickclick!
MERITSS. T.I.E.S. MIRJE. But by far the most entertaining one we could dial into (at least without getting into trouble) was the MECC Timesharing System, or MTS.
During my high school years between 1978 and 1981, I was introduced to such concepts as:
* E-mail between people located in geographically diverse areas (well, as far north as Hibbing and Duluth MN and as far sound as Rochester MN).
* Real-time chat programs with multiple channels, and some of them with fanciness like built-in dice rollers for RPG use.
* COMBAT!! MU,COMBAT,USMK001 or MU,CCOMBAT,USMK031 brought you into a world where everyone was piloting a ship with a single laser and a pair of missle tubes, and where folks would type in arcane commands like "L2000 M2 M2", peer at the scrolling yellow paper, and check their stopwatches for the magic time when the missles reloaded and the laser was cool enough to fire again.
* Karnath! Multiuser dungeoning at its best.
* Programming! BASIC, Fortran (MUMNF), and other fun things.
What a blast. My introduction to the BBS world and Fido/RIME/I'Link a decade or so later was a lot of fun as well, but timesharing systems are where I really began to appreciate the things that could be done with computer systems...
...as evidenced by a number of other entries in his jargon file.
When I screw up, though, I have to use the fallback version (latest stable).
:-)
Still, it's fun to test it in this way. Eating my own dogfood and all that makes it more obvious when I decide to shoot myself in the foot, or head.
I'm dead serious!
(Okay, maybe not completely.)
I'm guessing we'd see a few more results out here in the real computing world...
Anyone can spend money, and I'm quite aware of the many things that they're supposedly working on, but why aren't we seeing any real benefit in the Microsoft products that we're actually using on a day-to-day basis?
It's one thing to work on pie-in-the-sky research (and I have no problem with that), but quite another to do that while also continuing to maintain one of the most problematic computing platforms in history in an almost unchanged state for over a decade.
Some of the money might be better spent researching things like Linux Capabilities, a feature that the mainframe OSes I play^H^H^H^Hwork on for a living have had for a number of decades now.
I mean, UNIVAC boxes and VAXen both had the concept of a permissions bitmask down over 20 years ago, so what the heck is Microsoft's problem? Too expensive to implement? I think not...
Four years is a very long time in some contexts, and a flash in the pan in others. As a Linux hobbyist and Unisys (Sperry/UNIVAC) OS2200 programmer, I can appreciate both extremes. :-)
My web site is hand-coded and intended to be lynx friendly. No fancy flash animations, I'm afraid...
Maybe that's because Microsoft has demonstrated that a technology company doesn't have to engage in any original work at all in order to be wildly successful, at least in the current US legal climate...
OS/2 Warp 4 was released 10 years ago.
:-)
The last public FixPak was released in January 2001, or just a little over four years ago.
eComStation 1.2 was released in August, 2004, or a little less than a year ago.
Maybe you're just out of the loop?