My classic computer is better than today's modern machines because..

[MarkO]

 

Debian is the base distro, which ubuntu made their distro on top of, then mint made theirs on top of debian and or ubuntu

 

Sorry for getting that wrong... ( I am a Red Hat/Cent OS fan )... I was told by an Engineering College Student that Ubuntu came first and Debian was derived from it, and IIRC, the MINT page mentions that is was derived from Debian....

[MarkO]

Both in fact, as the regular Mint is an Ubuntu derivative but there's also LMDE which is directly based on Debian.

 

I am impressed by the fact that MINT Installs and runs on most hardware, like it was an OS you were buying or licensing..

 

It is the closest thing I have seen to replacing Windows for the common user...

[MarkO]

<< SNIP >>

 

Oh my wife also informed me that the new couch isn't "compatible" with our other furniture so it all has to be replaced. My stool was compatible with everything I had before I was married, especially "milk crate book shelf 2.0"

 

Or 1"x12" by 3' or 4' or 8' Blue Pine and 12"x12"x4" Cinder Blocks.....

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wDtxYeJdzg

[atarian63]

Classic machines with their 'instant on' and no bloat, are always going to have a place in my heart but I remember the first time I booted GEOS for the C64. Painfully slow disk drive access (no speed up cart back then) didn't help, but was starting to become aware of the fact that it's now "stylish" to have an operating system run an operating system.

Geos for the pc was pretty cool, did you ever try it?

[atarian63]

I, too, miss the days of near-instant boot. But that was before the days of the Internet and malware, and 3,000 attempts-per-day of your server being hacked from bots in China.

 

Windows Updates suck, but I can't help but be grateful for them, for how much worse would it be, without them?

 

My only Linux experience is with Ubuntu (I'm thinking of switching to MINT but know very little), which updates fairly-frequently, as well, although we all know it's more secure than Windows.

 

I wish I had some serious seat time with a Modern Mac; I really like them but they're just so expensive, now! I'm guessing that they must update, too. There's just no way around it, is there? I liked my ST booting in a few seconds (as long as there was a readable floppy in drive A), but an automated Windows/Linux update (annoying as they are) is a whole lot easier than disassembling the machine and prying the TOS ROMs out of the sockets!

I dunno, I like the fast boot, changing roms is so worth the effort. Wish it was still this way

[atarian63]

Like grouchy old farts who claim to be computer geniuses then whine it takes an hour to install a stupid inkjet in windows

or un educated young ones that have no idea how things should work due to lack of experience

Edited February 1, 2014 by atarian63

[Osgeld]

I dunno, I spend as much time shaking my fist at my apple II or my Mac SE as I do windows, sure the II is instant boot, has to be or else it leaves garbage in ram while switching programs hehe

[roland p]

Sir Clive Sinclair agrees:

 

"The sad thing is that today's computers totally abuse their memory – totally wasteful, you have to wait for the damn things to boot up, just appalling designs. Absolute mess! So dreadful it's heartbreaking."

 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/28/clive-sinclair-interview-simon-garfield

[simbalion]

While today's computers are great in that they can do a lot and the fact we can do things like the forum here, I do think they should look back and take some hints from the earlier home computers. One is the lack of 'bloatwear' and efficient use of memory. I also tend to agree with Sir Clive about IBM, in fact several history shows I have watched about the 80's and the home computer seem to agree as well. One show pointed out that the reason why the IBM PC sold wasn't because of its capabilities, but because of its name. Yes, it had those three magic letters 'IBM', so it must have been professional and capable of doing things for business!

[mbd30]

How long before they start consuming all that performance with shovelware, subscription services, and internet advertising? It will be another x amount of years before the joe-blow public consumer can utilize that power. For it will take a 10GHz machine to overcome the crapware load.

 

It takes hobbyist and enthusiast to work around all the commercial garbage and realize that performance. H & E can load their own OS spam-free with the applications they want.

 

If you're at all computer-savvy then your computer will not be loaded with shovelware, subscription services, internet advertising, etc.

 

I use Adblock Plus. I uninstall any shovelware.

[ClausB]

...because it was new, exciting, innovative, and exclusive. Everything I learned about it raised me one step higher toward the creative geniuses behind it. Modern Micros#!t machines are dumbed down appliances with ugly APIs that force you to lower yourself to their level.

[Kyle22]

I only use networked NON Win-Printers. That means that on one server, I can share the printer. Any computer on the network, including MS-DOS machines may print to it by: net use LPT1: \\dell690\laser /user:administrator password

 

My Atari 800 can also print to it using my Corvus box which contains a Neoware thin client (and a hard drive) running APE under XPe that is networked. The thin client boots XP (very quickly) from a SSD which is write protected with EWF so it can't be damaged. This is in an old Corvus OmniDrive box. The only original Corvus parts are the power supply and the fan. I enlarged the hole in the back where the DIP switches were and mounted an SIO2PC in the back panel. The thing works well. I can Remote Desktop into it and change the APE drive mappings, etc.

 

OK, technically, Windows XP is helping me to better use my 800, but, overall, my 800 has access to thousands of files, multiple printers, and TCP/IP Telnet. It is all in an old Corvus box, so it looks good beside the 800. So, a modern machine is acting as a helper for the 800, That's the only way I know how to describe it.

 

I encourage others to build a similar box. Use Corvus OmniDrive (won't work on the 8bit anyway), take out the controller and massive MFM drive. I mounted a Neoware CA15 board in there, on top of the metal supports that held the old motherboard. I had to bend one metal tab backwards for the holes to line up. It all fit very well. I used a USB drive adapter and IDE 80G drive at the bottom of the case, and the screws lined up through the bottom case slots.

 

I'll try to get pictures up. It's not perfected yet... I don't have all the front panel LEDs wired up yet, but I will.

 

-K

[rivercityrandom]

The classic computers booted up quickly, to be sure, but if you had to load anything from floppy disk, or god forbid, cassette, it took forever and mistakes and data loss were common. And while you had full access to the underlying hardware, you could only run one program at a time. Great for playing games, but I wouldn't want to do anything resembling work on an Atari 800 or a TI-99/4A. I handle hundreds of emails, word processing documents and spreadsheets on a daily basis. If I had to read all of those in TI-Writer, Multiplan, and whatever people did for email back then, I'd shoot myself.

 

And while my modern PC takes 2 minutes to boot up, it starts up again in about 10 seconds from sleep mode. And I can program in more languages than BASIC and assembly. I don't have to know a myriad of PEEKs and POKEs in order to produce graphics on my PC. And if I don't want viruses, bloatware, adware, crapware, and shovelware, I can run Linux. As if there weren't plenty of viruses and crappy programs in the 8-bit days too. They didn't charge you for day-one DLC or "speed packs," but spending all your Christmas money on a game that sucked still felt like a kick in the nuts. And there was no internet back then; you had to have a magazine subscription or know friends with the same computer you did to know what was new or good for your machine. Yeah, there's plenty about today's computers that sucks, but I'd rather have my Thinkpad than an 8-bit machine.

[Kyle22]

And while my modern PC takes 2 minutes to boot up, it starts up again in about 10 seconds from sleep mode. And I can program in more languages than BASIC and assembly. I don't have to know a myriad of PEEKs and POKEs in order to produce graphics on my PC.

Please go ahead and load BASIC on your PC, then write a program with a graphics mode, then plot and drawto... Produce some lines and squares on your computer. I don't know of any BASIC, or any other language that allows direct peeks and pokes to the hardware of any Windows machine.

 

I have never seen a virus infect a machine running SpartaDOS-X.

 

While you're at it, try to produce a Display List Interrupt on your PC.

 

Just a few thoughts

 

-K

[Osgeld]

 

I have never seen a virus infect a machine running SpartaDOS-X.

I have never seen SpartaDOS-X, so by that logic it must not exist

 

 

I don't know of any BASIC, or any other language that allows direct peeks and pokes to the hardware of any Windows machine.

 

um duh, that was his point, you dont need to know some magic bullcrap to something simple

[rivercityrandom]

Yeah, that was my point. IBM BASIC didn't support PEEKs and POKEs. Even in assembly language, you pretty much accessed the hardware on an IBM PC through the BIOS and the device drivers. Writing to direct addresses in RAM was severely deprecated after the 286 was released with protected mode, and very much unallowed if you wanted to run your program in a multitasking operating system such as Windows. And on modern x86 chips, all x86 machine code is converted in the processor to RISC micro-code, so you're not even accessing the registers directly!

 

And I wasn't even thinking about drawing lines and shapes in BASIC. I was thinking that on my modern computer, I can fire up Photoshop or even Microsoft Paint, pull out my Wacom tablet, and draw something that would have made everyone in my computer class jealous in 1982. I remember making everyone jealous when I figured out, after an hour of sweating, how to draw a filled circle in Apple II LOGO... but you can do that in two seconds on any computer that came out after the first Macintosh.

[The Usotsuki]

Yeah, that was my point. IBM BASIC didn't support PEEKs and POKEs.

It most certainly did, and I frequently POKEd the screen memory with it. You could even do CALLs, though it was a bit convoluted; for example:

 

X=0

DEF SEG=&HFFFF

CALL X

 

to do a reboot in GW-BASIC/BASICA (comparable to CALL -1370 on an Apple).

[Kyle22]

This might blow your mind, so hold on tight....... I LOVE POKEing the ANTIC to produce the the display that I want... It is SO much easier to write an Atari program than to use PhotoShop on a Windows or Mac machine to create simple graphics.

Edited February 11, 2014 by Kyle22

[Osgeld]

I personally find the oppsite, and would rather spend time writing conversion scripts, and have than pixeling in

[rivercityrandom]

It most certainly did, and I frequently POKEd the screen memory with it. You could even do CALLs, though it was a bit convoluted; for example:

 

X=0

DEF SEG=&HFFFF

CALL X

 

to do a reboot in GW-BASIC/BASICA (comparable to CALL -1370 on an Apple).

 

I stand corrected. Huh. You learn something every day. I need to fire up my old Tandy 1000 and try that out.

[Keatah]

I took transparent graph paper, specially scaled and printed for the Apple II hi-res screen and overlaid it on Playboy mags. We'd painstakingly "plot" out our favorite pictures like a bastardized connect-the-dots game of some sort. Then me and my buddies would spend like 3 weeks after school HPLOT'ing in a hi-res picture on the Apple II. Lo and behold it worked!

 

I "drew up" the memory map and flowchart for the program, my other buddy did the color picking and dot plotting, and another guy did the typing. We'd switch off jobs from time to time. But I figure it took about 2-3 weeks for the whole process to run from start to finish. Remember, we were trying to make mix tapes and play games and do-it-all including calling BBS'es. Plenty of distractions no doubt.

 

Soon enough I had a breakthrough and learned the DATA statements and how to DIMension a string or variable. The resulting Basic program shrunk considerably.

 

And then much later on I acquired a Computer-Eyes digitizer and rented a shoulder-crushing RCA camcorder (vidicon tube) from the video rental store and the whole process of making hi-res pictures flew by in a matter of minutes! After the proof of concept of doing things that way. I got a smaller camera-only thing with a copy table for like $699.

 

Soon enough I got into writing a conversion program that would PEEK out the values, store them in text file, and then we could transfer them to a C-64 or Atari 400/800 by connecting 2 300-BAUD modems together and sending a simple file which was the x,y and color data. On the other target systems I had little to do other than match colors and scale the image.

 

Ladies and gentlemen. THIS was indeed pioneering work at its finest! Tedious or not, it was FUN!

[Kyle22]

10 for x=1 to 10: ? "You are an asshole": next x

15 poke 764,255:?"Press the Any key to continue"

20 if peek(764)=255 then 20

25 ? USR(58487)

[Kyle22]

Not directed at anyone ine in particular... I just love the Any Key Concept.....

[am1933]

Sir Clive Sinclair agrees:

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/28/clive-sinclair-interview-simon-garfield

When it comes to timescales-how long did Sir Clive keep customers waiting for the QL and what was hanging out the back of the machine when it arrived?

He is most certainly right when it comes to the overall efficiency of modern machines though.