Oolite Bulletins

Thirty years - tempus fugit.

Oh, I feel old now. <sighs>

<nods> Aye... oh to be a thirty-something again!

It took almost 10 years for Windows to catch on. When I had my first job involving PCs in 1989, we didn't even talk about Windows, and one or two years later, the only Windows 2.x program I used from time to time was Reversi...

Yeah, I wasn't using it back then. Mid-eighties, I was learning COBOL and working on an Apricot PC - a nice machine, was that.

COBOL...

Around 1990 I used to program in Pascal and Modula-2. The latter was a fine language, but sadly it didn't catch on. I had to learn COBOL when I studied computer science, but I never had to use it in earnest. And today I wouldn't even succeed to write a hello-world program.

Fritz wrote:

It took almost 10 years for Windows to catch on.

We had one machine running Windows 2.0 in order to run Word, for one very "special" engineer who got anything he wanted. So in the midst of a flotilla of DOS 2.0 machines I was also trying to support Windows 2.0 and all the issues with Enhanced vs Expanded memory, 640K memory limits, etc.

My one memento from that period of my life...

There aren't enough swear words in English to describe my frustration at how Microsoft, Intel, MS-DOS & Windows have comprehensively knobbled what should have been a new technological revolution. Ever since the first PC appeared the world has stagnated.

It's 2015, damn it! Where's my flying car!? Why is there no moonbase!? Where are the jetpacks, personal hovercrafts, underwater cities & supersonic trains!?

This isn't the Future; it's a new dark age. And I know whom I blame.

....and it might still be working its magic 30 years in the future...

we had an XT clone with a 286 card in it.. it had a harness going to the 40 pin cpu socket. we ran windows on it..... did a lot of PCb layouts and schematic diagrams. i used a program called ORCAD for that.
one of our XT's ( the bosses) something like a 20MB hard card. ie a hard dick on an ISA card... spent half of a friday setting it up then on the weekend he took a floppy disk of a game to play on it and then did a diskcopy of the game. wiped the damn thing clean...

3.11 was not bad... did a remote install of win 95 on my brother in laws computer... 25 ish 3 1/2 floppy disks over the ph as i talked him through the install... dont ever want to do that again!!

but contrary to that article i never had any problems with ME and i ran Vista for 7 years with no problems.... i only went to win7 when the boot HDD died.

Thought this was good...

Was an enthusiastic c64 kiddie/coder. Later migrated to an amiga and got in touch there with a multitasking os, and later datatypes, kind of codecs/drivers for different filetypes. So I came a bit later into contact with Microsoft.

When I switched to the PC architecture it was indeed like a time machine to the already previously mentioned darkage... Ok, my 1st pc came with more RAM (8MB yay!... wait 640kb...) and was quicker and had better Sound and GFX capabilities but I really thought it a joke when all I got to use it was DOS 6.2 and an ugly looking UI called Win3 using 3 letter extensions for filedetection.

This was also the time when I as a spoilt Amigan brat fled right into the arms of the penguin, which was a decission I never regretted.
Even now using Windows at work, on the way or being asked to fix someone's computer feels it awkward and clumsy..

Sorry. MS But happy Birthday anyway.

Smivs wrote:

....and it might still be working its magic 30 years in the future...

<chortles> Ah yes, Penguinistas... the under 2% crowd!

This...

Amah wrote:

Was an enthusiastic c64 kiddie/coder. Later migrated to an amiga and got in touch there with a multitasking os, and later datatypes, kind of codecs/drivers for different filetypes. So I came a bit later into contact with Microsoft.

When I switched to the PC architecture it was indeed like a time machine to the already previously mentioned darkage... Ok, my 1st pc came with more RAM (8MB yay!... wait 640kb...) and was quicker and had better Sound and GFX capabilities but I really thought it a joke when all I got to use it was DOS 6.2 and an ugly looking UI called Win3 using 3 letter extensions for filedetection.

That!

Cody wrote:

Smivs wrote:

....and it might still be working its magic 30 years in the future...

<chortles> Ah yes, Penguinistas... the under 2% crowd!

Well, I have an own distribution just for my very own.

btw, Fritz I was experimenting with Oberon back then. Nice language, though I always was a bit pusher and favoured low level languages.