Bud Frede
Thu, 13 Apr 2017
10:34:20 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:
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 do wish I'd kept my coco3...It was my first computer.
I don't know what happened to it.
I just don't have enough time to play with all the cool new toys
there are, let alone old ones.
Same here.
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.)
ROFL.
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.
It did have some issues some serious with the way in which it did
things and expected you to interact with it, but, still not as a bad
as it was during win3.x days. And, as another poster commented, you
could ****up your code in one console/session and cause a cascade
crash throughout the OS. That sucked ass at times...
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.
When writing the kernel for an OS, that's not the time to practice a
new language.
I think that's EComStation, which is what OS/2 is being called
these days.
Ahh. That explains it. I haven't seen os/2 (or warp) since the board
was taken down for the last time, it was time for the SysOp to attend
college and it was time for me to be moving on as well. So, I never
kept up with it. I do miss those days though. Things were so much
different. a good board had something very close to a real family.
We'd goto cookouts, help each other out in person, etc. Nothing like
things are today.
I even remember a weekend I spent at my buddies house who ran the
board. It was time to do a system wide backup. He asked how much
space I had on my 486DLC/40 (yea, cyrix) along with the other
CoSysOps. We networked them with cat5 (practically unheard of then)
and did a major data backup, spanning across to other machines so he
could replace a bad hd and put the data back and get the board back
up and going. That was fun as hell man. For all of us. Was our first
time actually hands on networking the boxes in that way. [g]
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.)
I loaded an apple emulator a few months ago. I did the same thing as
you when I got it running. Okay, cool, just like I remember it. Now,
WTF am I going to do with this thing? I have NOTHING it knows about,
and, nothing I have outside of it's emulated world will even talk to
it.. so.. what good is it now. lol.
So, I fired up oregon trail and ran it for a couple of hours. Other
than the trip down memory lane as a kiddo, it was of no further use.
It was kind of neat that I remembered all the keyboard commands and
was able to get out of the running game and edit variables on the
fly; the old 'cheats' still worked. [g] Of course they would have,
the computer and game thought it was the 80s. heh.
I still play nintendo on an emulator from time to time on my linux
lappies. Avoid the noid, Mike tysons super punchout; before Nintendo
re-released it without tyson. Last night, I played a game of super
mario brothers 3. If my linux machine was self aware, it would
probably seriously question the point in emulating 8bit hardware on
it's 64bit platform. As in, "seriously dude? WTF are you doing? I'm
basically idling doing this, you know that right?" lol
--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.