On 04/13/2017 05:34 AM, Bud Frede wrote:
Diesel writes:

philo news Apr 2017 13:33:20 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:


Out of all my vintage machines I think the IBM PS-2 is my
favorite,

I can't say as I found that series of machine a favorite. Very
proprietary, totally turned me off of it.

One good thing about most of the old IBM PCs of the '80s is that they
came with good keyboards. I know a lot of people who used their IBM
keyboards long after the PC it came with was landfill.


At one time I had a lot of those good/ sturdy click/clack keyboards, I
think I only have one left/

As for vintage PCs, I have a hard time thinking of any PC that I've
thought was interesting enough to keep around as more or less a curio. I
have an Apple IIGS Woz Edition though, and wish I had an Altair or maybe
a Heathkit H11... I also have some old Sun hardware that I've fired
up occasionally, but I'll probably chuck even that since it's not that
fun to play with compared to say a Raspberry Pi.

I just don't have enough time to play with all the cool new toys there
are, let alone old ones.




I use to spend hours fooling with those antiques but packed away or gave
away all of them
It's a 486 33 mhz but runs Win95 great!

SX or DX? When we ran boards, windows 95 wasn't so hot on those

I never ran any of the DOS-based Windows versions, and don't associate
the word "great" with any of Microsoft's software. (Although I suppose
you could say that much of it is a great PITA.)


machines once you went multiline. OS/2 warp OTH, ran swell. Available
applications were very limited, and that's IBMs fault. They didn't do
anything as far as serious advertising goes. So, few developers took
it seriously. If it had IBMs support behind it, it would have rocked
the socks off anything MS was offering at the time. Especially when
you consider MS was working jointly with them until they had a
falling out. And thus was born MS own 'version' known as Windows NT.

I used OS/2 from 2.1 to Merlin and was pretty happy with it, but I've
talked to people who developed apps for OS/2 and they say that it wasn't
that wonderful. It had IBM working on it, where developers were judged
by how many KLOCs (1000s of Lines Of Code) they could churn out, so not
much in the way of elegant code got added in that way. Then you had some
clowns at Microsoft where they didn't care about the quality of the
code, they just wanted to crank it out, sell it, and then fondle their
stock options. I've read that Microsoft also did some things to sabotage
the OS/2 development effort, and of course they left a lot of stuff
half-finished when they screwed IBM and concentrated on Windows 3
instead.

The core of NT was evidently quite good, but the people who were
developing the GUI parts also decided that it would be a good idea to
try to learn C++ at the same time. I've read that Cutler was not happy
with how they turned his silk purse into a sow's ear.


And the rest as they say, is history...

I also fooled with OS/2 and even have ECS running in a virtual
machine just for the heck of it

I'm not familiar with ECS.

I think that's EComStation, which is what OS/2 is being called these
days. I thought about seeing if I could get it running in a VM, but
could never drum up enough interest to do so. (I've played with an Amiga
emulator and a Commodore 64 emulator in the past, and once I got it up
and working, I was at the "what do I do with it now?" stage and I
suspect it would be the same with OS/2.)