New Computer

[2manyrocks]

Controlling access to third party apps is probably a step along the road to ongoing OS subscription fees.

 

[WinterDeere]

Bought my bag phone in 1994 for $261. There were no cell phone stores then, had to buy from a commercial radio store. Things were changing rapidly then.

Weird. I was already using a flip phone for at least a year prior to 1994.

 

[WinterDeere]

There is a 10 year pause in computer development, that I think most people don't know about. This was a 10 year period from "I'm say'en ," 1986 to 1996. Its a lost ten years to get the IBM architecture up to speed. Which people did, eventually and surpassed all the other designs, but there were better ones that just didn't get the market share.

Those are the years I was getting my degree in computer engineering, and watching the explosion of development at both Motorola and Intel. You're calling the development of the Pentium a "stall"? What about the PowerPC? Our first non-deterministic operating systems in both MacOS and Win95?

 

[MossRoad]

Those are the years I was getting my degree in computer engineering, and watching the explosion of development at both Motorola and Intel. You're calling the development of the Pentium a "stall"? What about the PowerPC? Our first non-deterministic operating systems in both MacOS and Win95?

Yeah, the pentium was a stall. It was a 32 bit processor that came out a year or two after DEC Alpha 64 bit processor came out. They didn't hit 64 bit for 10 more years.

 

[Locoweed]

Dual booting is one way to accomplish that. Another way is creating virtual machines. I have XP & 10 virtual machines for special needs.

 

[Xfaxman]

I'm still running Win 7, and when that gets too risky, I'll probably switch to one of the distos of Linux.

Check out ChromeOS Flex : https://www.google.com/search?q=chr...l4j69i60l3.30579j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

It will run Linux.

 

[kenmbz]

ATT had a great Unix front end, Novell bought it and it went by the wayside.
It was too bad as that would have given Novell a front end for their servers and made them more competitive. The CEO was removed not too long after this fiasco and his purchase of word perfect.

 

[MossRoad]

Shortly after I started at the newspaper, I think in the early 90's, they started using UNIX on Sun Microsystems hardware when converting from manual markup to electronic pagination of ads. They were elegant things of beauty and paid for themselves quickly. Our other systems ran on VAX's and VMS. Those were OK, but VMS was pretty complicated compared to UNIX.

I had to laugh at this story from 1988...
We'd cringe every time we had to consult the 5' wall of books to find out how to do something in VMS. We could pretty much figure it out on our own with UNIX.

One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there. -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984 [It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken Olsen's brain. Ed.]

​

 

[kenmbz]

Dec had vax clusters and shared memory spaces in the late 80's. Sun did not have this until well into the late 90's.
I upgraded a Sun system from i386 to SPARC - around 1990 and that was so stressful.
When the system booted, I just went home and slept, instead of doing all the checks.
The upgrade included changing out the mother board and adding ram boards and then OS upgrades and changes.
I had everything set up and prepared, so it only took me about 18 hours !

 

[MinnesotaEric]

My old PC is a 2017 refurb from Dell. Nice when new but now it's rather average and outdated.

My desktop computer is a 2015 27" iMac with four aging i7s stumbling along at 4.0Ghz, 32GB RAM and terabytes of different SSD storage all used for video editing. Editing 4k video and even downsampling 4k video takes a lot of time now.