History of The PC - How We've Progressed
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No, some of us have a family and a life outside of computers. With a single income and no government support (I'm too darn rich) money goes quickly. Fortunately for you Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters can't get pregnant so this won't be a problem for you. :-D OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
Your right. I forgot that some people are married :). Oh I guess this isn't in my bio, but I'm not married. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:
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What makes you so confident about Linux? It sure has come a long way and in many cases installs as easier as Windows (I say this from practical experience installing Linux Mandrake on Compaq and Dell machines), but where are the applications and development tools? More important, where are the developers and support staff? and finally, where are the users? -Thomas
You do not seem to understand the nature of the Linux and Open Source development. Specifically: where are the applications and development tools Well, it all comes out of the box. You can also find a lot of applications on the Internet for free for for a very low price, many can do all that MS Office package does etc. I wonder where are the development tools for Windows, ah, right, you have to buy them separately! where are the developers and support staff Developers ARE a support staff, they can be easily found in various newsgroups and mailing lists. Typically you can get help within couple of hours if not minutes from some other developer. Not to mention that you have the source code most of the time so you can help yourself if nothing else. Now, tried Microsoft Support? It takes days, sometimes weeks to actually get some useful response. We often abandon the option of searching for support for Windows related problems because we can't afford the delay and we look for workarounds instead... where are the users All around the place, and many of them are also developers. In fact the real big money is using Unix'y systems very often as they need a serious tools for the job.
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No, some of us have a family and a life outside of computers. With a single income and no government support (I'm too darn rich) money goes quickly. Fortunately for you Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters can't get pregnant so this won't be a problem for you. :-D OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
>>OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Not me Michael! :confused: Care to elaborate? Cheers, Paul (a London dweller)
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It's been quite a ride for me... 1) Atari 400 6502(?) with 8K of RAM and add-on cassette tape storage 2) Apple //e 6502, with 128K RAM, CPM/80-column card, 2 5-1/4 inch floppy drives, monochrome monitor (remember AmDek?) AppleCat/3 300bps modem 3) Sperry XT 8088, 640K RAM, 5-inch floppy, 20mb hard drive, CGA 4) Home-built 80286 with 1MB RAM, 80287 math co-processor, 3-inch and 5-inch floppies, 40mb hard drive, and EGA 5) Compaq 80386 lunchbox portable 1MB RAM, 40MB hard drive (won in a contest) 6) Home-built 80486 DX/2-50 1MB RAM, 20mb/40mb hard drives 7) Home-built Pentium 75, 2mb RAM, 250mb hard drive 8) Home-built Pentium 120, 4MB RAM, 250mb/500mb hard drives 9) Home-built Pentium2/233, 32MB RAM, 500mb/1gb/2gb hard drives 10) Home-built Pentium2/450, 64MB RAM, 6gb/9gb/4gb hard drives 11) Home-built AMD T-bird 1Ghx, 768MB RAM, 6gb/10gb/15gb/20gb/9gb/4gb hard drives Memories: A) 20MB MFM hard drives that cost over $700 B) 32MB of memory was $1000 C) Turbo Pascal 2.0 was only $39 D) Low-level formatting of MFM ard drves could only be performed in debug, using the magic command "g=c800:5". E) You could actually get useful help with MFC and windows programming in general when you called the MSDN help line. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
About 1984: Jupiter ACE (4Mhz Z80 with a whopping 3KBytes of RAM. Forth interpreter in ROM, resulting 956 Bytes for program and data. Rubber keyboard with 40 keys. 1986: first activities of self-built 6809 system running FLEX (that was an operating system look-alike). Afterwards: the typical PC crap. About 1992 a 386-40 with 16 MBytes RAM, running the first pre-beta-release of Windows NT 3.1. Tried OS/2 2.0 then, but abandoned it due to the lack of development tools. NT user since then. Current: DELL I8K with UXGA screen and a pIII-600 with 256 MBytes RAM, running W2K (the best NT version up to now). An elderly pIII-600 system with 256 MBytes sits under my desk and is feeling heavily outdated. Test with a new Athlon-1400 system showed it's floating point performance to be thrice as fast as the pIII-600. Where will we be in, say, five years from now? p6-7.5 with 8 GBytes or TriAthlon-10G with 16 GBytes? Massive SMP machines even for the home user? (Currently, I'm swarming for Tyan's Bi-Athlon mainboard) Microsoft Word EBTTLRNWICH? (even better than the last release, now with integrated cup holder) Will Microsoft's licencing policy survive? Will there still be Linux? Would Mr. Gates be the next President of the United States? (not _that_ unlikely, they already had pathetically bad actors)
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About 1984: Jupiter ACE (4Mhz Z80 with a whopping 3KBytes of RAM. Forth interpreter in ROM, resulting 956 Bytes for program and data. Rubber keyboard with 40 keys. 1986: first activities of self-built 6809 system running FLEX (that was an operating system look-alike). Afterwards: the typical PC crap. About 1992 a 386-40 with 16 MBytes RAM, running the first pre-beta-release of Windows NT 3.1. Tried OS/2 2.0 then, but abandoned it due to the lack of development tools. NT user since then. Current: DELL I8K with UXGA screen and a pIII-600 with 256 MBytes RAM, running W2K (the best NT version up to now). An elderly pIII-600 system with 256 MBytes sits under my desk and is feeling heavily outdated. Test with a new Athlon-1400 system showed it's floating point performance to be thrice as fast as the pIII-600. Where will we be in, say, five years from now? p6-7.5 with 8 GBytes or TriAthlon-10G with 16 GBytes? Massive SMP machines even for the home user? (Currently, I'm swarming for Tyan's Bi-Athlon mainboard) Microsoft Word EBTTLRNWICH? (even better than the last release, now with integrated cup holder) Will Microsoft's licencing policy survive? Will there still be Linux? Would Mr. Gates be the next President of the United States? (not _that_ unlikely, they already had pathetically bad actors)
> Where will we be in, say, five years from now? Intel is claiming that we'll be at 20Ghz by 2006 (probably 4th quarter - :) ). I want to know when we'll be at the point of using optical circuits instead of that slow-ass copper stuff. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
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>>OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Not me Michael! :confused: Care to elaborate? Cheers, Paul (a London dweller)
Not me Michael! :confused: Care to elaborate? Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters is your hand and also your sexual partner. A lovely euphemism for masturbation. An example to use on a wanker talking about his latest conquest - "So how is Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters?" :-D Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
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It's been quite a ride for me... 1) Atari 400 6502(?) with 8K of RAM and add-on cassette tape storage 2) Apple //e 6502, with 128K RAM, CPM/80-column card, 2 5-1/4 inch floppy drives, monochrome monitor (remember AmDek?) AppleCat/3 300bps modem 3) Sperry XT 8088, 640K RAM, 5-inch floppy, 20mb hard drive, CGA 4) Home-built 80286 with 1MB RAM, 80287 math co-processor, 3-inch and 5-inch floppies, 40mb hard drive, and EGA 5) Compaq 80386 lunchbox portable 1MB RAM, 40MB hard drive (won in a contest) 6) Home-built 80486 DX/2-50 1MB RAM, 20mb/40mb hard drives 7) Home-built Pentium 75, 2mb RAM, 250mb hard drive 8) Home-built Pentium 120, 4MB RAM, 250mb/500mb hard drives 9) Home-built Pentium2/233, 32MB RAM, 500mb/1gb/2gb hard drives 10) Home-built Pentium2/450, 64MB RAM, 6gb/9gb/4gb hard drives 11) Home-built AMD T-bird 1Ghx, 768MB RAM, 6gb/10gb/15gb/20gb/9gb/4gb hard drives Memories: A) 20MB MFM hard drives that cost over $700 B) 32MB of memory was $1000 C) Turbo Pascal 2.0 was only $39 D) Low-level formatting of MFM ard drves could only be performed in debug, using the magic command "g=c800:5". E) You could actually get useful help with MFC and windows programming in general when you called the MSDN help line. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
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You do not seem to understand the nature of the Linux and Open Source development. Specifically: where are the applications and development tools Well, it all comes out of the box. You can also find a lot of applications on the Internet for free for for a very low price, many can do all that MS Office package does etc. I wonder where are the development tools for Windows, ah, right, you have to buy them separately! where are the developers and support staff Developers ARE a support staff, they can be easily found in various newsgroups and mailing lists. Typically you can get help within couple of hours if not minutes from some other developer. Not to mention that you have the source code most of the time so you can help yourself if nothing else. Now, tried Microsoft Support? It takes days, sometimes weeks to actually get some useful response. We often abandon the option of searching for support for Windows related problems because we can't afford the delay and we look for workarounds instead... where are the users All around the place, and many of them are also developers. In fact the real big money is using Unix'y systems very often as they need a serious tools for the job.
George, I am not saying that *Windows is better than Linux* or that *Linux costs more than Windows*. Where are the users/applications? Finally, the market is users, who are not developers. I accept that the GUI of Linux are very good now and I like Gnome very much. I am using a Linux Mandrake machine with Gnome and StarOffice. But, K-Office and StarOffice are nowhere near MS Office. There has to be migration procedures and tools built-in to help them and people DO NOT mind paying for their Office tools. I hope Sun comes up with a paid StarOffice, that takes itself up as a competitive business to MSOffice. It SHOULD make it a point to make migration possible. I would say the same about Corel WordPerfect (which I have not seen). Sun is talking of making StarOffice an application service. Basically, they are going back to the "Larry Ellison network computer" concept and will kill StarOffice. I think that Ximian is doing a good job addressing these issues. Where are the developers? I am talking about people moving from Windows to Linux. A large majority of business app developers are VB developers. This makes it difficult for a company with VB code base to move to Linux. Where are the support staff? If you go to a small office, you will find a few PCs and one guy who did 6 months training on Windows and getting paid 2500 dollars to 4000 dollars a month. If he is asked by his boss, the small business owner, about Linux, he will say that he knows nothing. *The installation of Linux Mandrake was easier than Windows 2000 on the same machine*. But, how many people know that? I am personally asking people to use the Linux machine that I installed. I made all the tech guys I know try to install Linux mandrake atleast once. The office users find StarOffice not as *aesthetic* as MS Word/Office. Conclusion It takes more than technical excellence to beat MS and get their market share. There has to be an effort to make students and homeusers use it. This can only be done by taking the *geek* image out of Linux and launching a good PR campaign promoting the easy to install and use factor. The technical nature of talks about Linux has to change to a user-centric one. Someone has to tell users that Linux is great and easy to install/use. No one is doing that now. Maybe, Redhat, MandrakeSoft, IBM, Sun etc.. will become more aggressive in their PR campaigns to paint a *friendlier* image for Linux. Thomas
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It's been quite a ride for me... 1) Atari 400 6502(?) with 8K of RAM and add-on cassette tape storage 2) Apple //e 6502, with 128K RAM, CPM/80-column card, 2 5-1/4 inch floppy drives, monochrome monitor (remember AmDek?) AppleCat/3 300bps modem 3) Sperry XT 8088, 640K RAM, 5-inch floppy, 20mb hard drive, CGA 4) Home-built 80286 with 1MB RAM, 80287 math co-processor, 3-inch and 5-inch floppies, 40mb hard drive, and EGA 5) Compaq 80386 lunchbox portable 1MB RAM, 40MB hard drive (won in a contest) 6) Home-built 80486 DX/2-50 1MB RAM, 20mb/40mb hard drives 7) Home-built Pentium 75, 2mb RAM, 250mb hard drive 8) Home-built Pentium 120, 4MB RAM, 250mb/500mb hard drives 9) Home-built Pentium2/233, 32MB RAM, 500mb/1gb/2gb hard drives 10) Home-built Pentium2/450, 64MB RAM, 6gb/9gb/4gb hard drives 11) Home-built AMD T-bird 1Ghx, 768MB RAM, 6gb/10gb/15gb/20gb/9gb/4gb hard drives Memories: A) 20MB MFM hard drives that cost over $700 B) 32MB of memory was $1000 C) Turbo Pascal 2.0 was only $39 D) Low-level formatting of MFM ard drves could only be performed in debug, using the magic command "g=c800:5". E) You could actually get useful help with MFC and windows programming in general when you called the MSDN help line. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
- Commadore 64C, 640K RAM, 5¼ floppy drive. 2) Pentium 1 100, 32MB RAM, 2GB hard drive 3) Pentium 3 966, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive I don't upgrade much :)
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> Where will we be in, say, five years from now? Intel is claiming that we'll be at 20Ghz by 2006 (probably 4th quarter - :) ). I want to know when we'll be at the point of using optical circuits instead of that slow-ass copper stuff. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
I read some universities have working optical processors but they are not ready for the commercial market.