This thread should be retitled "How to feel like a fossil, but an
experienced one."
I started in 1970 with a DEC PDP-8 that was based at my high school and
time-shared with schools around the Boston area. We used a dialect of
BASIC called FOCAL (for copyright reasons). I/O was via a mechanical
teleprinter (Model 33?) with yellow paper on a roll. There were orange and
brown switches through which you toggled in the bootstrap loader so it
could read the paper tape programs. I fooled around with machine language
a bit. But there was a super-genius at my high school who always did it
better and faster than I did, so after a while I lost interest in the
hard-core stuff.
My first "computer" of my own was an HP-25 programmable calculator (1976),
which taught this music and theatre major math concepts he didn't get in
college. Then I got a TRS-80. Used that until I went into computers for a
living in 1983. I worked on the original IBM XT, but owned a Kaypro with
CP/M (ZCPR). WordStar keystrokes are still in my fingers. When I wrote
music reviews for a Seattle-area newspaper, I used WordStar, stripped off
the high bits with a little utility, and sent my copy to the newspaper's
mainframe via a 300 baud modem. I had to remember to type two single quote
marks for standard double quotes.
Since then, I've used most versions of DOS and Windows, some UNIX, but
almost no Mac. When I was Novell admin at a university, I found that there
was a group of users that always had huge difficulty changing their
passwords. They were all Mac users, and they were all from the School of
Education. I draw no conclusions from this fact. I merely point it out in
the spirit of lighthearted banter.
I used Windows XP for years. Like my employer, I skipped Vista. I think
Windows 7 is very nice, provided you have the hardware to run it with
reasonable speed. For my wife, XP on a 6 year-old Dell Optiplex is
fine--she just uses email, and translates documents to and from Russian in
Word. For my memory-hungry photo programs, Win7 is better and more
stable. Only this year did I retire my 7 year-old Dell and picked up a
nearly-new Dell refurb to run Win7.
And I still think XyWrite 3 was the best word processor ever.
--Peter
Jim Nichols sez:
> Hi Chris,
>
>
> I started with CP/M on a Xerox machine using two 8-inch floppy disks,
then moved on > to DOS, and reluctantly changed to Winders. XP has been
the best of the versions > that I have used.
>
> Jim Nichols
> Tullahoma, TN USA
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Barker" <ftog [at]
threeshoes.net>
> To: "Olympus Camera Discussion" <olympus [at] thomasclausen.net>
> Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 12:51 AM
> Subject: Re: [OM] On the subject of Photoshop Police
>
>
>
> We now have XP Professional on our network machines at work, Jim, and
it's the least > unhappy that I've been Winders so far (starting with
Winders 1 in the 1980s at > MacDill AFB).
>
> Chris
>
> On 9 Dec 2011, at 02:53, Jim Nichols wrote:
>
>
> I'm just happy that I'm still getting updates for XP. I see no reason to
go to > another version of Windows until the computer goes belly-up and
I have to
> buy a new one with a new system already installed.
>
>
> --
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