Like most people who bought into the OS/2 hype, I bailed after 1.3.
I still have a circa-1996 486 running Windows 95. It has an EPROM burner card and software that I use to reprogram the ECM in my car. The cost of upgrading to modern software and hardware is substantial, plus the…
Yep. Boston Dynamics has been dependent on military contracts since their founding in 1992. The "no more military weapons" statement seems to have been after they were acquired by Hyundai. Boston Dynamics' business is,…
We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas)…
Sage Accounting is prone to various connectivity gollywobbles between the server and workstations. The first troubleshooting recommendation is to turn off IPv6. About 75% of that time, the problem then goes away.
I don't own anything with a fingerprint scanner. My phone has a camera, but I don't use a phone for internet.
If the AI does spelling and grammar fixups, I'll root for the AI. When I was in corporate IT, I got way too much internal email that looked like it had been pecked out by an autistic second-grader, with random spelling,…
Back in the (early 1960s?) Isaac Asimov wrote a book on how to do arithmetic calculations in your head. He pointed out that someone who developed that skill could solve problems faster in their head than by reaching for…
I'm another who never stopped. I still use matchbox-sized MP3 players, replacing them when they die. Wifi is sparse in my area, and even cellular signals are unreliable (and expensive), so I stayed local-only. The…
I understand the "everybody does it that way" aspect of the cloud, but the old way of subscribing to a dynamic DNS and hosting locally still works just fine and you have full control of things. Later, once you have more…
A friend of mine is getting ready to retire after 30-odd years in IT. He has already tooled up and trained for his retirement profession: farrier; the guy who makes and installs horse shoes. It's more profitable than it…
I'm mostly retired now, and my paying work involves maintenance on proprietary inventory and billing software written in a 1960s language in a dialect that became unsupported in the mid-1980s. And it runs in MS-DOS.…
My development is on Linux. Some of my work has to run on Windows as well; VirtualBox has several Windows VMs, a ReactOS VM, and Wine for testing. I've never had to deal with the BSDs or Macs. If a customer was willing…
> Just speak clearly. --- I finally got (very expensive) hearing aids, and made several trips back to the audiologist to have them tuned. Then I wound up not wearing them, because most people think they're speaking…
Please don't inflict Gnome upon them.
If it was local - implanted, or on my body, it might be a useful tool with the correct training. If it was networked, it would need to have much tighter security than the current internet. If it was just a terminal to…
Sounds like Jeff Duntmann's "jiminy", which he wrote about in PC Techniques magazine back in 1992. A matchbox-sized general purpose computer and life log, infrared connections to peripherals as needed, with a mesh…
Windows Phone's UI is still with us, from Windows 8 onwards. Everything on 8, 10, and 11 is optimized for a touch interface on a small screen, which is ridiculous on a modern desktop with a 32" or so monitor and a…
I'm booting and running Haiku on my Thinkpad. It's a from-scratch workalike of BeOS, and able to run Be software. Though, frankly, Be software is totally 1990s, so a lot of Linux software written for Qt has been ported…
Wine predates ReactOS. It was basically a FOSS duplicate of Sun's WABI. I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for ReactOS' lack of printing…
I tried several "information management" and "knowlege management" programs over the years, but none of them worked the way I wanted. My original method was a directory full of plain text files arranged by subject, that…
LLMs remind me of the children's game "Telephone."
The only true "system programming" I've done was in Microsoft Macro Assembler, a product I grew to hate with a passion. A non-answer, but tangentially relevant: I once fiddled with Forth, but never actually accomplished…
On the other hand, the Ultibo OS for the Raspberry Pi is written in FreePascal.
That happened to me six years ago. After a few weeks I quit beating my head against the wall, created an email account elsewhere, and eventually got most correspondents to use the new address. And I quit using Google…
Like most people who bought into the OS/2 hype, I bailed after 1.3.
I still have a circa-1996 486 running Windows 95. It has an EPROM burner card and software that I use to reprogram the ECM in my car. The cost of upgrading to modern software and hardware is substantial, plus the…
Yep. Boston Dynamics has been dependent on military contracts since their founding in 1992. The "no more military weapons" statement seems to have been after they were acquired by Hyundai. Boston Dynamics' business is,…
We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas)…
Sage Accounting is prone to various connectivity gollywobbles between the server and workstations. The first troubleshooting recommendation is to turn off IPv6. About 75% of that time, the problem then goes away.
I don't own anything with a fingerprint scanner. My phone has a camera, but I don't use a phone for internet.
If the AI does spelling and grammar fixups, I'll root for the AI. When I was in corporate IT, I got way too much internal email that looked like it had been pecked out by an autistic second-grader, with random spelling,…
Back in the (early 1960s?) Isaac Asimov wrote a book on how to do arithmetic calculations in your head. He pointed out that someone who developed that skill could solve problems faster in their head than by reaching for…
I'm another who never stopped. I still use matchbox-sized MP3 players, replacing them when they die. Wifi is sparse in my area, and even cellular signals are unreliable (and expensive), so I stayed local-only. The…
I understand the "everybody does it that way" aspect of the cloud, but the old way of subscribing to a dynamic DNS and hosting locally still works just fine and you have full control of things. Later, once you have more…
A friend of mine is getting ready to retire after 30-odd years in IT. He has already tooled up and trained for his retirement profession: farrier; the guy who makes and installs horse shoes. It's more profitable than it…
I'm mostly retired now, and my paying work involves maintenance on proprietary inventory and billing software written in a 1960s language in a dialect that became unsupported in the mid-1980s. And it runs in MS-DOS.…
My development is on Linux. Some of my work has to run on Windows as well; VirtualBox has several Windows VMs, a ReactOS VM, and Wine for testing. I've never had to deal with the BSDs or Macs. If a customer was willing…
> Just speak clearly. --- I finally got (very expensive) hearing aids, and made several trips back to the audiologist to have them tuned. Then I wound up not wearing them, because most people think they're speaking…
Please don't inflict Gnome upon them.
If it was local - implanted, or on my body, it might be a useful tool with the correct training. If it was networked, it would need to have much tighter security than the current internet. If it was just a terminal to…
Sounds like Jeff Duntmann's "jiminy", which he wrote about in PC Techniques magazine back in 1992. A matchbox-sized general purpose computer and life log, infrared connections to peripherals as needed, with a mesh…
Windows Phone's UI is still with us, from Windows 8 onwards. Everything on 8, 10, and 11 is optimized for a touch interface on a small screen, which is ridiculous on a modern desktop with a 32" or so monitor and a…
I'm booting and running Haiku on my Thinkpad. It's a from-scratch workalike of BeOS, and able to run Be software. Though, frankly, Be software is totally 1990s, so a lot of Linux software written for Qt has been ported…
Wine predates ReactOS. It was basically a FOSS duplicate of Sun's WABI. I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for ReactOS' lack of printing…
I tried several "information management" and "knowlege management" programs over the years, but none of them worked the way I wanted. My original method was a directory full of plain text files arranged by subject, that…
LLMs remind me of the children's game "Telephone."
The only true "system programming" I've done was in Microsoft Macro Assembler, a product I grew to hate with a passion. A non-answer, but tangentially relevant: I once fiddled with Forth, but never actually accomplished…
On the other hand, the Ultibo OS for the Raspberry Pi is written in FreePascal.
That happened to me six years ago. After a few weeks I quit beating my head against the wall, created an email account elsewhere, and eventually got most correspondents to use the new address. And I quit using Google…