You're not the first to notice that!! one fellow I know went from an XT to a 486 to a Pentium-something-newish, and said of it: That XT never crashed, not once in all the years he'd had it (bought in 1986, IIRC). Conversely the newer machines could be counted on to crash with some regularity. Progress, bah humbug!!
And there are thousands of XTs and pin-impact printers still cranking out invoices in dusty warehouses, too dumb to know when they're dead:)
Back in MY day, sonny, we had to carve our own computers out of wood, and push the data uphill both ways, in the CGA snow!
Kids these days, they've got it way too easy... a 12MHz calculator, indeed. What's wrong, your fingers fall off? Why, in MY day we had to take off our shoes and count in base20!!
Whoa, you're OLD!:) I once owned a Timex Sinclair, but I could never get it to do anything useful (and it almost FUBAR'd the TV it had been hooked to -- must have done something bad, made it act crazy for some days afterward).
I know someone who still uses a CP/M machine for a Real Job, since he still hasn't found a modern replacement for one particular calendar app that he uses, that calculates moon phases and suchlike. (Calendar Creator comes close, but doesn't quite cut it.)
Alas, where I live, the curbside still garners no better than a 486. But I know a guy in the Buffalo NY area, who has found stuff like a Celeron 833 (or something in that range, I forget exactly) on the curb, intact, with 17" monitor, and 100% working.
Might be worthwhile to spend a day blue-barrelling in Beverly Hills, tho:)
Picky, picky... I just don't distinguish among 8-bit IBM-compatibles. To me they're ALL an "XT" even if technically it only refers to one particular model. The sad creature of original mention had only two 360k floppies, and no brain, er, I mean HD. It was a very late model and was from when unscrupulous dealers were dumping 8bit stuff on the unsuspecting as the world moved on to the 386. (I'm glad I borrowed it, not bought it!)
Conversely Berlioz, the XT (whether that's the technically correct name for it or not:) I've got in The Closet has had every upgrade available except a mathco... it has 640k on the motherboard, 10MHz CPU, TWO hard disks, 1.2mb and 1.44mb floppies, and get this, VGA. And it even still knows the date (must have a clock card that still has a good battery. With a dead battery, clock cards believe the world starts at 1-1-2000.)
VGA, you scoff? Yes, some ISA and even VLB VGA cards DO work in an 8bit bus, in fact *all* ISA and VLB Trident video cards will do so, since the control path is all in the 8bit part, and the rest is used only for bandwidth. This does wonders for performance; in fact it outruns my 12MHz 286 with Herc mono. Goes to show how much lag that mono card puts on the system.
[eyeing sig] Nope, unless you changed it in the past 12 hours... got the link from one that specifically mentioned the DMCA. Still, the result is the same:)
There's a fellow hereabouts whose sig proclaims something like "Sig: Method for recognising other posters." That would be my method, too.... Names? Whuzzat?? In one eyeball and out the other!!
(Which is why mumblety-mumble years later -- having come in when identity theft was a problem around here -- I still haven't changed mine to my "real" sig:)
Wow, punching your own holes... did you have at least have a template to get the rectangles the right shape?;)
I'm afraid we were kinda spoiled in my high school... we actually had a card punch for that newfangled IBM1620. When we got a paper tape reader to load the OS, it was a BIG upgrade, and cut boot time in half!!
Yep, that old 286 taught me a LOT about optimizing, about forcing stuff to play nice together like it or not, about how to get the most from what paltry abilities it had. It was a far more thorough learning experience than anyone will ever get from being handed a spiffy new machine where everything works without effort. And it's the foundation of what I do with computers today. And it's so much easier to understand modern stuff if you know what's behind it.
"We have done so much for so long with so little, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.":)
What was officially called an "XT", yeah, but I don't bother to distinguish -- anything 8bit and PC is an "XT" as far as I care about it:) There was such a thing as a 2MHz CPU, tho, and a few sad specimens had 'em. This one has long since gone back to its original owner, and on to a series of other unfortunates. It was still in everyday use as late as 1996.
I've got a working XT in The Closet that has a 10MHz CPU, the ultimate in the 8-bit PC experience:) And it performs no worse than, say, XP on a P100. Scary, eh?:)
I didn't say responsive (nor did I say it had no swapfile -- I didn't check how much it used, but I expect it was plenty); I said "usable". Stuff worked, and within a reasonable timeframe; not even so bad as to rate "sluggish", tho no one would have called it "swift". I was amazed, to say the least. I'd read that with less than 32mb of physical RAM, W2K would flat refuse to even boot up.
I don't run a swapfile with Win95 and 256+mb RAM, or with Win98/ME/2K/XP and 512+mb RAM. I've tracked usage, and when very busy with big apps, Win95 uses no more than 160mb total and the others use no more than 450mb total. Win2K is actually the leanest of that second set; even so, without a swapfile, 256mb would be pushing it, unless it was doing a fairly singleminded task that didn't create RAM-usage spikes.
However, I have run Win95 on 8mb with no swapfile (by accident -- poor old P75 had been partially dismangled before I got it, and I didn't realise the swapfile was set to a HD that no longer existed), and oddly enough it performed much better than after I noticed the error and reset it to a partition that still existed. Ooops again!!
I'm voting against the Calif. bond issue, meant to fund stem cell research, even tho I'm fully in favour of such research. Why? Because, as you imply, it's not gov't business one way or the other (and it sure as hell shouldn't be done as an additional burden to taxpayers -- bond money is NOT free!) It IS the business of privately-funded research -- hey, go for it. If you make tons of money while you're at it, well, use it to fund more research.
And ever notice the people who pay no taxes are the most adamant about max-taxing the rich?
BTW, I'm mostly a Republican, but not at all dogmatic about it. (Except that I firmly believe that the "religious right" should be taken out and shot.:)
Yep, I agree with what you're saying. If a politician changes his mind *due to getting more and better info* about [insert topic here], that's a sign of intelligence, to be recognised even if I don't agree with his politics. If he just says whatever [insert audience of the day here] wants to hear, that's just vote-mongering.
Something Bush said during the first campaign that stuck in my mind: someone brought up that he'd had a drinking problem. He responded (this is close to word for word), "Yes, I used to drink too much. I found that it interfered with my ability to do my job, so I quit."
Point being, at least Bush CAN recognise when he's being stupid (and we're all stupid sometimes, especially when we're young) and can decide to do something to fix the problem.
And it's part of why, while sometimes I'd like to whack Bush upside the head, I'm voting for him and not for Kerry.
(My major reasons are economic: Democrat admins typically spell bad times for small businesses that depend on a middle class with disposable income. We're finally coming out of the downswing from the Clinton years, and I'd prefer to be able to pay my mortgage.)
My impression of Kerry from all sources is that he's in favour of more control over the people, so long as it doesn't involve controlling HIM personally.
BTW you'll occasionally read that Win2K won't run on a 486. I can attest otherwise... one day I grabbed a HD off the junk stack, hooked it to a 486DX4-100 (with a paltry 8mb RAM) that I use as a SIMM tester, and found myself watching Win2K boot up. Ooops... It took about 4 minutes to get to the desktop, but amazingly, it was usable after that. I'd have thought at the very least it would choke on so little RAM, but apparently not.
Re:You know, we did word processing before...
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
[laughing] My first PC was a 2-floppy, 2MHz XT, with Herc mono graphics. WordPerfect 5.0 was crisp, even running off a floppy. After a dedicated word blender, it was heaven. And when I replaced that with a 12MHz 286 (also with Herc mono, but it had a HD, and WP5.1 along with various other apps of the day), it was, like, WOW!! Everything ran like the wind. Well, Ventura Publisher 2.0 took a while to load, but it ran fine. I still have the 286, and in a pinch... it still does everything I can't live without.
Nowadays... we struggle to get decent performance out of machines THOUSANDS of times faster than those relics.
BTW I'm writing this on a P3-550, somewhat slower than the average of what's now found on the curb. (Methinks I need to look at a better class of curbside.:)
Happens I still use an ancient proprietary DOS database, because I haven't yet found a replacement that works as well for the job. And a while back I talked the coder into giving me a copy of the source code, which proved to be in Pascal.
Now, I'm an interested bystander but not a programmer. Nonetheless, just from knowing the app well in everyday use, I can make sense of the Pascal source (even tho there's not a single comment anywhere) -- enough to have some idea what I'd like to tweak, and maybe even how to do it.
Hmm. Interesting point, and perhaps copyright might be comparable to, say, leasing mineral rights on real property. But if they're gonna insist that copyright is a real property right, doesn't that make it subject to Emminent Domain?;)
Come to think of it, fair use would then be much like an easement, where pretty much if someone can pay to establish the easement (or if it falls under emminent domain), they can force you to give them a certain amount of free access.
Ya know, they may be sorry they ever brought it up.:)
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You're not the first to notice that!! one fellow I know went from an XT to a 486 to a Pentium-something-newish, and said of it: That XT never crashed, not once in all the years he'd had it (bought in 1986, IIRC). Conversely the newer machines could be counted on to crash with some regularity. Progress, bah humbug!!
:)
And there are thousands of XTs and pin-impact printers still cranking out invoices in dusty warehouses, too dumb to know when they're dead
Kids these days, they've got it way too easy... a 12MHz calculator, indeed. What's wrong, your fingers fall off? Why, in MY day we had to take off our shoes and count in base20!!
Whoa, you're OLD! :) I once owned a Timex Sinclair, but I could never get it to do anything useful (and it almost FUBAR'd the TV it had been hooked to -- must have done something bad, made it act crazy for some days afterward).
I know someone who still uses a CP/M machine for a Real Job, since he still hasn't found a modern replacement for one particular calendar app that he uses, that calculates moon phases and suchlike. (Calendar Creator comes close, but doesn't quite cut it.)
Alas, where I live, the curbside still garners no better than a 486. But I know a guy in the Buffalo NY area, who has found stuff like a Celeron 833 (or something in that range, I forget exactly) on the curb, intact, with 17" monitor, and 100% working.
:)
Might be worthwhile to spend a day blue-barrelling in Beverly Hills, tho
Ah. Well, don't drop the deck, unless you want to do some "reassembly" :)
Picky, picky... I just don't distinguish among 8-bit IBM-compatibles. To me they're ALL an "XT" even if technically it only refers to one particular model. The sad creature of original mention had only two 360k floppies, and no brain, er, I mean HD. It was a very late model and was from when unscrupulous dealers were dumping 8bit stuff on the unsuspecting as the world moved on to the 386. (I'm glad I borrowed it, not bought it!)
:) I've got in The Closet has had every upgrade available except a mathco ... it has 640k on the motherboard, 10MHz CPU, TWO hard disks, 1.2mb and 1.44mb floppies, and get this, VGA. And it even still knows the date (must have a clock card that still has a good battery. With a dead battery, clock cards believe the world starts at 1-1-2000.)
Conversely Berlioz, the XT (whether that's the technically correct name for it or not
VGA, you scoff? Yes, some ISA and even VLB VGA cards DO work in an 8bit bus, in fact *all* ISA and VLB Trident video cards will do so, since the control path is all in the 8bit part, and the rest is used only for bandwidth. This does wonders for performance; in fact it outruns my 12MHz 286 with Herc mono. Goes to show how much lag that mono card puts on the system.
[eyeing sig] Nope, unless you changed it in the past 12 hours... got the link from one that specifically mentioned the DMCA. Still, the result is the same :)
:)
There's a fellow hereabouts whose sig proclaims something like "Sig: Method for recognising other posters." That would be my method, too.... Names? Whuzzat?? In one eyeball and out the other!!
(Which is why mumblety-mumble years later -- having come in when identity theft was a problem around here -- I still haven't changed mine to my "real" sig
What? You're outsourcing your hole punching? For shame!! ;)
Wow, punching your own holes... did you have at least have a template to get the rectangles the right shape? ;)
I'm afraid we were kinda spoiled in my high school... we actually had a card punch for that newfangled IBM1620. When we got a paper tape reader to load the OS, it was a BIG upgrade, and cut boot time in half!!
Yep, that old 286 taught me a LOT about optimizing, about forcing stuff to play nice together like it or not, about how to get the most from what paltry abilities it had. It was a far more thorough learning experience than anyone will ever get from being handed a spiffy new machine where everything works without effort. And it's the foundation of what I do with computers today. And it's so much easier to understand modern stuff if you know what's behind it.
:)
"We have done so much for so long with so little, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing."
At such speeds, you gotta time it with an hourglass anyway... er, what am I saying?!
Ah, an even earlier species of word blender, from the era that brought us the abacus :)
What was officially called an "XT", yeah, but I don't bother to distinguish -- anything 8bit and PC is an "XT" as far as I care about it :) There was such a thing as a 2MHz CPU, tho, and a few sad specimens had 'em. This one has long since gone back to its original owner, and on to a series of other unfortunates. It was still in everyday use as late as 1996.
:) And it performs no worse than, say, XP on a P100. Scary, eh? :)
I've got a working XT in The Closet that has a 10MHz CPU, the ultimate in the 8-bit PC experience
I didn't say responsive (nor did I say it had no swapfile -- I didn't check how much it used, but I expect it was plenty); I said "usable". Stuff worked, and within a reasonable timeframe; not even so bad as to rate "sluggish", tho no one would have called it "swift". I was amazed, to say the least. I'd read that with less than 32mb of physical RAM, W2K would flat refuse to even boot up.
:)
I don't run a swapfile with Win95 and 256+mb RAM, or with Win98/ME/2K/XP and 512+mb RAM. I've tracked usage, and when very busy with big apps, Win95 uses no more than 160mb total and the others use no more than 450mb total. Win2K is actually the leanest of that second set; even so, without a swapfile, 256mb would be pushing it, unless it was doing a fairly singleminded task that didn't create RAM-usage spikes.
However, I have run Win95 on 8mb with no swapfile (by accident -- poor old P75 had been partially dismangled before I got it, and I didn't realise the swapfile was set to a HD that no longer existed), and oddly enough it performed much better than after I noticed the error and reset it to a partition that still existed. Ooops again!!
Strange and bizarre are the ways of Windows
I'm voting against the Calif. bond issue, meant to fund stem cell research, even tho I'm fully in favour of such research. Why? Because, as you imply, it's not gov't business one way or the other (and it sure as hell shouldn't be done as an additional burden to taxpayers -- bond money is NOT free!) It IS the business of privately-funded research -- hey, go for it. If you make tons of money while you're at it, well, use it to fund more research.
:)
And ever notice the people who pay no taxes are the most adamant about max-taxing the rich?
BTW, I'm mostly a Republican, but not at all dogmatic about it. (Except that I firmly believe that the "religious right" should be taken out and shot.
Yep, I agree with what you're saying. If a politician changes his mind *due to getting more and better info* about [insert topic here], that's a sign of intelligence, to be recognised even if I don't agree with his politics. If he just says whatever [insert audience of the day here] wants to hear, that's just vote-mongering.
Something Bush said during the first campaign that stuck in my mind: someone brought up that he'd had a drinking problem. He responded (this is close to word for word), "Yes, I used to drink too much. I found that it interfered with my ability to do my job, so I quit."
Point being, at least Bush CAN recognise when he's being stupid (and we're all stupid sometimes, especially when we're young) and can decide to do something to fix the problem.
And it's part of why, while sometimes I'd like to whack Bush upside the head, I'm voting for him and not for Kerry.
(My major reasons are economic: Democrat admins typically spell bad times for small businesses that depend on a middle class with disposable income. We're finally coming out of the downswing from the Clinton years, and I'd prefer to be able to pay my mortgage.)
And on that note, I got this interesting link off someone's sig hereabouts:
http://reason.com/hod/jb072604.shtml
My impression of Kerry from all sources is that he's in favour of more control over the people, so long as it doesn't involve controlling HIM personally.
BTW you'll occasionally read that Win2K won't run on a 486. I can attest otherwise... one day I grabbed a HD off the junk stack, hooked it to a 486DX4-100 (with a paltry 8mb RAM) that I use as a SIMM tester, and found myself watching Win2K boot up. Ooops... It took about 4 minutes to get to the desktop, but amazingly, it was usable after that. I'd have thought at the very least it would choke on so little RAM, but apparently not.
[laughing] My first PC was a 2-floppy, 2MHz XT, with Herc mono graphics. WordPerfect 5.0 was crisp, even running off a floppy. After a dedicated word blender, it was heaven. And when I replaced that with a 12MHz 286 (also with Herc mono, but it had a HD, and WP5.1 along with various other apps of the day), it was, like, WOW!! Everything ran like the wind. Well, Ventura Publisher 2.0 took a while to load, but it ran fine. I still have the 286, and in a pinch... it still does everything I can't live without.
:)
:D
Nowadays... we struggle to get decent performance out of machines THOUSANDS of times faster than those relics.
BTW I'm writing this on a P3-550, somewhat slower than the average of what's now found on the curb. (Methinks I need to look at a better class of curbside.
But I still use WP5.1 every day.
Also, note how the WM people's solution involved multiple sales of Server2K. Interesting, eh??
One would hope not, but you can bet that there are lawyers willing to argue it!
Wow, that's pretty ambitious, and sounds like it was a bloody fun BBS. Very cool.
BTW, have you been to bbsmates.com??
Geez, "Birthday" is only up to v2.0, and already it's bloatware ;)
Happens I still use an ancient proprietary DOS database, because I haven't yet found a replacement that works as well for the job. And a while back I talked the coder into giving me a copy of the source code, which proved to be in Pascal.
Now, I'm an interested bystander but not a programmer. Nonetheless, just from knowing the app well in everyday use, I can make sense of the Pascal source (even tho there's not a single comment anywhere) -- enough to have some idea what I'd like to tweak, and maybe even how to do it.
Now THAT is readability!
Hmm. Interesting point, and perhaps copyright might be comparable to, say, leasing mineral rights on real property. But if they're gonna insist that copyright is a real property right, doesn't that make it subject to Emminent Domain? ;)
:)
Come to think of it, fair use would then be much like an easement, where pretty much if someone can pay to establish the easement (or if it falls under emminent domain), they can force you to give them a certain amount of free access.
Ya know, they may be sorry they ever brought it up.