I once installed Excel, with the Windows 2 runtime it was bundled with, on an 8 MHz XT clone (8088 with all 640k installed) with no real trouble. The biggest challenge was the 1.2M 5-1/4" disk install media. It was really slow running, though.
I bought my Aspire One 720 at Radio Shack(!!!) for $300. It started with 4G of RAM, and I upgraded it to an unsupported 8G without any difficulties. It's a little slow but it runs a lot of different oses with VirtualBox as needed. I waited to buy a Netbook until the artificial 1G ram restriction that Microsoft imposed went away.
If there had been ten quirky brands of hardware environments to target, there wouldn't have been the critical mass of a hardware install base for the Linux hackers to focus on. The fact that there was an 'industry standard hardware base' in the form of the x86 clone motherboard made it easy for Linux to get a base to run on.
Everybody had an old '486 box to run it on. Many IT operations had old boxes that management had abandoned, for maverick techs to install Linux on. Where it Just Worked (tm)
In the 1980's Unix nearly DIED on the scattered hardware base. That was the biggest cause of all it's problems at the time.
Windows NT 4.0 is certified as POSIX compliant. And I am not just talking about the out-of-the-box rubberstamp POSIX subsystem. You can install INTERIX, which Microsoft bought and branded as 'Services for UNIX' and have a whole POSIX subsystem running on the NT Kernel, in parallel with the Win32 subsystem (not an 'operating environment' wrapped up in a Win32 DLL, which is what cygnus is)
I bought copies of Interix before and after Microsoft bought Softway Systems. I'll admit it was kind of amusing in 2000 to buy a toolchain from Microsoft that included the GNU Compiler.
If your favorite 'distro' is slackware, you're just a little work away from an upgrade to NetBSD. Where you have a solid userland all under the same code revision tag, and PkgSrc for everything else.
Not the dogs breakfast that any 'Linux' essentially is.
Linux on 68k, SPARC and ARM? Various dog's breakfast conglomerations that somebody got to work. On NetBSD all those architectures build a kernel and userland from the same tagged codebase.
But if you like muddling around in a different kludge on each architecture, it's all fine. I spent years fooling around with different Unixes on obscure hardware, too. (IRIS, HP-UX, Solaris, etc.)
It's nice to have one OS that works everywhere, not a kernel that kinda works and fifty different dogs breakfast userland kludges.
Conversely, it wasn't until the IBM PC forced the market to converge on some common defacto standards that the market became something more than a bunch of weird quirky machines that wouldn't work together at all. The only thing binding together the home computer field to any common standard before IBM was RS-232 and that funny tone a 1200 baud modem makes.
Linux wouldn't even exist in a world where there were ten different quirky brands of personal computer all working in different directions. Some would even say Linux wouldn't exist if Microsoft hadn't been forcing so much hardware into early obsolescence back in the mid 90's.
Apple also survived because they ruthlessly attacked all cloners with a pack of lawyers.
Essentially, Apple cleared the way for Windows' ultimate dominance by wiping out all the third party GUI vendors that were competing with Microsoft in that space. The GEM Desktop is one of the shining examples.
I have one of Steve Ciarcia's MPX-16 computers. This was one of the first 'somewhat PC compatible' computers made after the PC came out. It has ISA bus card slots and an 8088 processor but is otherwise considerably different from an IBM-PC. It has a single floppy drive and can boot it's own version of MS-DOS, but it doesn't have a keyboard/display interface. It's MS-DOS that runs over a serial console, you plug a terminal into a serial port.
The MPX-16 was a published home-brew computer project in Byte Magazine that Steve Ciarcia designed. I wasn't the original owner of my MPX-16, I inherited it from somebody and am sort of the curator of it. It's a somewhat important role, because the machine I have was one that belonged to one of Ciarcia's friends, and I have official original copies of the diskettes. Which are professionally labeled as being the 'Master Copies.'
I could only lust over the possibility of having an MPX-16 back when it was current hardware because I was a poor student. All I could afford was my SR-56 calculator, which I programmed and wrote games for.
When I was in High School we had two ASR-33 teletypes, a CRT display, and one Texas Instruments Silent 700 terminal in the computer lab.
The ASR-33s were 110 baud and had paper tape punch/reader so you could save your BASIC programs on paper tape.
The CRT was a 300 baud dumb terminal.
The Silent 700 terminal was a 300 baud printing terminal. The special thermal paper for it was expensive. The math teacher who taught the Computer Science class would say 'ten cents a foot' when people abused it.
We were always vying to get on the fast 300 baud terminals. The timesharing service we used was MECC.
When my father was a programmer at IBM, back in about 1960, the only input was a high speed punched card reader, and the only output was a high speed card punch.
The IBM 650 had some drum memory (a few kilobytes I believe) but the sequence to compile and run a new job was as follows:
1. Load in the Assembler by reading the program in on the card reader. The program was a deck of cards.
2. Run the Assembler.
3. Feed in your source code, which was a deck of cards, one line on each card. These were read as 'data' by the Assember which was presently running on the 650.
4. The Assembler would punch out a deck of 'object' cards.
5. Load the 'object' cards into the machine with the card reader and run your program.
When I was a Microfilm Camera Operator from 1980-1984 we had cameras that used PDP8's as the processor. They were used to mount and read the customers' 1/2" tapes so we could convert the data to microfiche. It was a job shop- we made fiche from tapes shipped in from all over the Midwest.
The PDP8s were already somewhat ancient even then. Every once in awhile a DEC Customer Engineer had to be called in to service one of them, with his Tek 475 oscilloscope that I lusted over.
They seem to only be talking about IT stuff, which is a shame, because Slashdot is much bigger than that. For awhile we were using a General Radio Megaohm Bridge that uses vacuum tubes, but I'm certain I've also run tests using a Variac from the 1950's.
As far as old IT stuff (*sigh*) up until a few years ago we were using some old Commodore SX64s to do some of the testing. Until about a year ago there were a bunch of PC-XTs at test stations out in the lab but those are gone now. The main life tests still run on 386 and 486 boxes because the Test Engineer can't be moved off of using his GWBASIC programs to run the stepper motor controllers and log results. I was setting up a test one one of those rigs today.
I took the SX64s home when they were being scrapped out, so I have four or five of those waiting to be tested, refurbished, then probably sold or traded to other collectors.
There are often tricks you can use. Most public libraries have open WiFi with relatively high speed connections.
You can use an offline updater like http://www.wsusoffline.net/ on a high speed connection somewhere and produce 'update rollup' DVD rom disks to install updates on machines with slow connections. I made a Windows XP update DVD image on the last day of Windows XP support.
Word for Windows 2.0 has some cool 'quirks' about it.
You can run Winword.exe alone without any other binaries or settings files on a Win16 or early Win32 OSes. And Winword.exe fits on a 1.44M floppy diskette.
Also, Winword.exe contains an alternative 'gui' you can switch it over to that turns it into a Visual Basic environment.
No. I want to type "New TV" into a search and find reviews and feature comparisons of models I might want to buy. And not from "sponsored" reviewers who are biased toward one brand. Most specifically I do NOT want to find advertisements.
There is a ton of advertising now for prescription medications. People now often go into the Doctor's Office with a preconceived notion of what medicine they want the doctor to prescribe. And then the Doctor is spammed with advertising from the drug companies as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You make that sound like a bad thing. You know, I hope, that you're posting on Slashdot??
Old Palms have a 68xxx processor. You'll have better luck running MacOS 7.5.
I once installed Excel, with the Windows 2 runtime it was bundled with, on an 8 MHz XT clone (8088 with all 640k installed) with no real trouble. The biggest challenge was the 1.2M 5-1/4" disk install media. It was really slow running, though.
I bought my Aspire One 720 at Radio Shack(!!!) for $300. It started with 4G of RAM, and I upgraded it to an unsupported 8G without any difficulties. It's a little slow but it runs a lot of different oses with VirtualBox as needed. I waited to buy a Netbook until the artificial 1G ram restriction that Microsoft imposed went away.
And Parents will whine when their children post videos set so that nobody over 18 can view them.
What sort of handwaving is this 'by all accounts' you're engaging in?
There's no proven record. We'll have to wait a bit. Take it easy.
If there had been ten quirky brands of hardware environments to target, there wouldn't have been the critical mass of a hardware install base for the Linux hackers to focus on. The fact that there was an 'industry standard hardware base' in the form of the x86 clone motherboard made it easy for Linux to get a base to run on.
Everybody had an old '486 box to run it on. Many IT operations had old boxes that management had abandoned, for maverick techs to install Linux on. Where it Just Worked (tm)
In the 1980's Unix nearly DIED on the scattered hardware base. That was the biggest cause of all it's problems at the time.
Windows NT 4.0 is certified as POSIX compliant. And I am not just talking about the out-of-the-box rubberstamp POSIX subsystem. You can install INTERIX, which Microsoft bought and branded as 'Services for UNIX' and have a whole POSIX subsystem running on the NT Kernel, in parallel with the Win32 subsystem (not an 'operating environment' wrapped up in a Win32 DLL, which is what cygnus is)
I bought copies of Interix before and after Microsoft bought Softway Systems. I'll admit it was kind of amusing in 2000 to buy a toolchain from Microsoft that included the GNU Compiler.
If your favorite 'distro' is slackware, you're just a little work away from an upgrade to NetBSD. Where you have a solid userland all under the same code revision tag, and PkgSrc for everything else.
Not the dogs breakfast that any 'Linux' essentially is.
Linux on 68k, SPARC and ARM? Various dog's breakfast conglomerations that somebody got to work. On NetBSD all those architectures build a kernel and userland from the same tagged codebase.
But if you like muddling around in a different kludge on each architecture, it's all fine. I spent years fooling around with different Unixes on obscure hardware, too. (IRIS, HP-UX, Solaris, etc.)
It's nice to have one OS that works everywhere, not a kernel that kinda works and fifty different dogs breakfast userland kludges.
I know this is off topic here, but my phone gets it's Windows 10 upgrade sometime next week.
You're really out of touch.
Conversely, it wasn't until the IBM PC forced the market to converge on some common defacto standards that the market became something more than a bunch of weird quirky machines that wouldn't work together at all. The only thing binding together the home computer field to any common standard before IBM was RS-232 and that funny tone a 1200 baud modem makes.
Linux wouldn't even exist in a world where there were ten different quirky brands of personal computer all working in different directions. Some would even say Linux wouldn't exist if Microsoft hadn't been forcing so much hardware into early obsolescence back in the mid 90's.
Apple also survived because they ruthlessly attacked all cloners with a pack of lawyers.
Essentially, Apple cleared the way for Windows' ultimate dominance by wiping out all the third party GUI vendors that were competing with Microsoft in that space. The GEM Desktop is one of the shining examples.
I have one of Steve Ciarcia's MPX-16 computers. This was one of the first 'somewhat PC compatible' computers made after the PC came out. It has ISA bus card slots and an 8088 processor but is otherwise considerably different from an IBM-PC. It has a single floppy drive and can boot it's own version of MS-DOS, but it doesn't have a keyboard/display interface. It's MS-DOS that runs over a serial console, you plug a terminal into a serial port.
The MPX-16 was a published home-brew computer project in Byte Magazine that Steve Ciarcia designed. I wasn't the original owner of my MPX-16, I inherited it from somebody and am sort of the curator of it. It's a somewhat important role, because the machine I have was one that belonged to one of Ciarcia's friends, and I have official original copies of the diskettes. Which are professionally labeled as being the 'Master Copies.'
I could only lust over the possibility of having an MPX-16 back when it was current hardware because I was a poor student. All I could afford was my SR-56 calculator, which I programmed and wrote games for.
When I was in High School we had two ASR-33 teletypes, a CRT display, and one Texas Instruments Silent 700 terminal in the computer lab.
The ASR-33s were 110 baud and had paper tape punch/reader so you could save your BASIC programs on paper tape.
The CRT was a 300 baud dumb terminal.
The Silent 700 terminal was a 300 baud printing terminal. The special thermal paper for it was expensive. The math teacher who taught the Computer Science class would say 'ten cents a foot' when people abused it.
We were always vying to get on the fast 300 baud terminals. The timesharing service we used was MECC.
When my father was a programmer at IBM, back in about 1960, the only input was a high speed punched card reader, and the only output was a high speed card punch.
The IBM 650 had some drum memory (a few kilobytes I believe) but the sequence to compile and run a new job was as follows:
1. Load in the Assembler by reading the program in on the card reader. The program was a deck of cards.
2. Run the Assembler.
3. Feed in your source code, which was a deck of cards, one line on each card. These were read as 'data' by the Assember which was presently running on the 650.
4. The Assembler would punch out a deck of 'object' cards.
5. Load the 'object' cards into the machine with the card reader and run your program.
Every assembler run would punch out a card deck.
You didn't want to drop your deck on the floor.
All hail the HP85 portable computer. A machine built to run an HP-IB test system.
When I was a Microfilm Camera Operator from 1980-1984 we had cameras that used PDP8's as the processor. They were used to mount and read the customers' 1/2" tapes so we could convert the data to microfiche. It was a job shop- we made fiche from tapes shipped in from all over the Midwest.
The PDP8s were already somewhat ancient even then. Every once in awhile a DEC Customer Engineer had to be called in to service one of them, with his Tek 475 oscilloscope that I lusted over.
They seem to only be talking about IT stuff, which is a shame, because Slashdot is much bigger than that. For awhile we were using a General Radio Megaohm Bridge that uses vacuum tubes, but I'm certain I've also run tests using a Variac from the 1950's.
As far as old IT stuff (*sigh*) up until a few years ago we were using some old Commodore SX64s to do some of the testing. Until about a year ago there were a bunch of PC-XTs at test stations out in the lab but those are gone now. The main life tests still run on 386 and 486 boxes because the Test Engineer can't be moved off of using his GWBASIC programs to run the stepper motor controllers and log results. I was setting up a test one one of those rigs today.
I took the SX64s home when they were being scrapped out, so I have four or five of those waiting to be tested, refurbished, then probably sold or traded to other collectors.
There are often tricks you can use. Most public libraries have open WiFi with relatively high speed connections.
You can use an offline updater like http://www.wsusoffline.net/ on a high speed connection somewhere and produce 'update rollup' DVD rom disks to install updates on machines with slow connections. I made a Windows XP update DVD image on the last day of Windows XP support.
Word for Windows 2.0 has some cool 'quirks' about it.
You can run Winword.exe alone without any other binaries or settings files on a Win16 or early Win32 OSes. And Winword.exe fits on a 1.44M floppy diskette.
Also, Winword.exe contains an alternative 'gui' you can switch it over to that turns it into a Visual Basic environment.
Maybe they have a big 31MB RAM disk that's their whole hard drive, and they never turn the thing off.
No. I want to type "New TV" into a search and find reviews and feature comparisons of models I might want to buy. And not from "sponsored" reviewers who are biased toward one brand. Most specifically I do NOT want to find advertisements.
There is a ton of advertising now for prescription medications. People now often go into the Doctor's Office with a preconceived notion of what medicine they want the doctor to prescribe. And then the Doctor is spammed with advertising from the drug companies as well.
Do you capitalize 'The People' because it's a proper noun?
Or is there a Party Representative who urges you to toe 'The Mass Line' in your work with 'The People'?