Ditto here, TRS80 model IIIs (never had one personally, but worked with a lot of them as a freelance programmer) and a true-blue-died-in-the-wool PDP-11/70 running Bell Lab’s Unix Level 7 at the Univ.
Held off on any non-TRS80 peecee until I got a '386 system.
The first computer I called my own (assuming the Ti58C I actually learned to program on doesn’t count as a “computer”) was a homebuilt XT clone made from Taiwanese bits and pieces, with 8088 CPU (soon upgraded to the wondrous NEC V20) and 2x 360KB floppy drives which were then joined by a venerable hardback-book-sized Seagate ST225 20MB drive… which at the time I thought was infinite space… now I carry a nail-sized 256GB SD card on my phone which is over 12.500 larger, and constantly run out of space…
Nice to be able to mix’n’match components from mobos to supplies to drives, etc. From there I’d frankenbuild various’n’sundry peecees.
Stuck with MSDOS 3.1 but then ditched anything with the M$ stank on it, in favor of PCDOS and 4DOS.
Granted, one can tell Gates is evil by just looking at him, but I sustain Jobs was as bad if not actually worse – he only disguised it (much) better behind that façade of “cool” he loved to pose with.
He’s buying up farmland at a breakneck pace and is one of those pushing the abolition of meat and forcing people (excluding himself and his cronies, of course) to eat bugs and be happy.
Well, that’s the average hypocrite mofo centi-billionaire for you. Not defending the effer by any means (I hate his effing guts) but at least Gates was not posing as a Dog-abiding Christian while cheating on his at-the-time pregnant wife with a pornstar (which he later paid hush money for, and then deduced it as ‘attorney fees’ on his company’s expenses, so he could also cheat on taxes), ditto not cheating contractors and employees out of their money by declaring multiple bankruptcies and getting out of these with more money then he came in, and then having the nerve to confirm it and then declare (on live TV!) that it “made him smart” — and all of that was before becoming the all-mighty Potty…, because then it became worse. And just for laughs, according to the latest lawsuits against him that guy isn’t even a real multi-billionaire, he just fakes it. What a poseur…
No idea what Jobs would be doing today if he were alive, but I sincerely wish Gates would’ve shared the same fate if only to spare the world from what he’s done and is still doing.
I echo Stallman’s words at the time Jobs was drag-and-dropped into that big trashcan in the sky: “no one deserves to die, but the world is certainly better off without him in it”. Gates would be about the same.
Yes, I remember very well the Netscape scandal. It was actually one of the key pieces of evidence against Microsoft in the anti-trust trial they were under at the turn of the century. BillG himself was called to testify and responded all/most of the questions with “I do not remember” (he could not plead the 5th because it was not a criminal trial). In the end MS was found ‘guilty’ and ‘sentenced’ to be divided into 3 separate companies – a sentence which has astonishingly NOT been carried to this day.
The only explanation I can see is that MS (as was later denounced) was donating effing tons of cash to BOTH parties – and we know that politicians are not even a little bit corrupt, now are they?
Netscape ended up in bankruptcy – but fortunately opened all their source code before going under, and that’s why we have wonderful Firefox to this day.
Actual toggle-switches on a front panel to be able to flick in your boot code.
Actually glad that aspect is long gone…
Funny thing is, at school we had a “connection” with Bell Labs and for a while we had access to actual source code for pretty much all of AT&T Unix.
PC/VI came out for the peecee (long before ‘vim’), and I noticed the same exact error/status messages between that, and the Unix version of ‘vi’. And actual termcap/terminfo settings!!
Even looking at the ascii dump of pc/vi, I could see oddball unixy text strings inside, so that was definitely a port of real ‘vi’ for the peecee.
Try a Maven 2 or especially Maven 3. Out of the box, nothing else installed, not so much as a ringtone, and after a little while of pretty much doing nothing, you’ll start getting critical low-space warnings
But yeah, I was The Scrounge King along with a coupla other classmates. We’d take cast-off drives, video boards, etc., and build these frankensystems that worked.
But one reason I absolutely DESPISED the peecee was the ugly-ass default fonts. ‘b’/‘d’ that looked like they were melting, a ‘!’ that looked like a footprint, disgusting wretched hideous font that just filled me with a blind rage every time I got on a peecee.
There was something called ‘egafont’ which I used to load a soft-font that I mirrorred off the font used on an ADM-11 terminal. Way way more readable. Did it up on 8x8 (cga), 8x12, 8x14 (ega) and 8x16/9x16 (vga+extensions), and would load that font. Would be happy 'til some dumb-ass program would do a video reset and I’d have to reload it again.
So I took apart my Paradise video card’s EPROMs, found the font data for various resolutions, and wrote my own EPROMs with my own fonts. Had lots of trial’n’error to figure out that it used checksums to make sure the ROMs were valid, so found where those lived and fixed 'em, then had an actual Paradise Plus/16 (odd/even EPROMs) with my own custom font actually f’n burned in!
I felt like f’n Columbo figuring out that shiite on my own.
After the company at the time was literally throwing out the 8bit Paradise cards, I “collected” about a dozen of them, did the same with them, and always had a decent vga video card that didn’t inspire me towards homicide.
So yeah, we’d trade video cards, scsi controllers, drives, various’n’sundry other boards, but were selfish greedy pigs when it came to memory sticks.
Hmm, I apparently did, because I don’t think I ever used that.
But also, I rarely hit the actual disk, though. Had 13meg RAM (maxed at 1+4+4+4), and used something like 4meg as a RAMdisk. No chance of f’ing up the spinny disk. Anything hangs, and instead of crapping the bed all across the spinny disk, it’d hose the ramdisk instead. Reset button, and everything’s pristine again!
Amiga user from '86 until C= went bankrupt. Then Linux-PC, now Windows. Learnt the hard way to go with the mainstream, even if soft- or hardware is suboptimal. Won’t look back.
I was not talking about Jobs but about a certain other (non-tech) billionaire The words “all-mighty Potty” pretty much give out who I’m referring to but if it’s still not clear, just think of the color orange
I can’t stand FF anymore, and it sucks almost as bad as everything else, and I only use it because it just sucks that much less than every other POS browser out there.
I still use pre-quantum FF locally for when I want javascript to actually work, and for some decent legacy sites, and post-quantum when I need to actually use a browser on “modern” POS websites that are so broken they pretty much only work on the latest versions of some browsers.
Blame webkit monkeys who lego together websites and call themselves “developers”.
Oooh a Linux-mentioning, billionaire-bashing thread. Love it.
Me I’ve been in the GNU ecosystem since I was 13 and never went back. Right now I’m rocking an ancient x230 with a liberated firmware running Debian 11 since I’m also a fan of milking hardware till it’s thoroughly dead.
$ srm -flvz ./Bill\ Gates
Same, that’s why I’ve switched to ungoogled-chromium
Oh man, seriously? Desqview aka DV.EXE was DA BOMB. It allowed me to do multitasking in DOS, with multiple (text-based) “windows”, basically like screen or tmux does on *ix, only better (really). Worked with 640KB, and if you had any kind of “extended” RAM like a 286 or 386 with even as little as 1MB RAM, it teamed up with QEMM to use that memory for multitasking too. It was wondrous at the time…
I used to admire Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
More recently, I don’t care for Musk, and even Bezos is kinda iffy, though I do like using Amazon.
Now, partly because of this thread, I’m not so sure about any of those billionaires like Gates and Jobs.
I like some things that Gates has done, but I know that he’s done some bad stuff as well.
I think Bezos is the “less worse” of the lot. I used to admire Musk (and thank him for Starlink), but given his latest and continuing bouts of stupid egocentrism, I now mostly think he’s an !@#$.
I don’t think anyone of this magnitude of wealth got there through pure deeds and compassion. We live in a world where there’s sufficient resources to let everyone live a dignified life yet we see the income gap widen and poverty rates rising, in no small part thanks to those of astronomical wealth seeking to further consolidate the world’s resources under their control.
but if it’s still not clear, just think of the color orange 
