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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

anders.unix.se

131–140 of 241 posts

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#131

"I do not tend to listen to music through my workstation, since that both distracts me and wastes cpu power. My workstation is a dual CPU, 500 MHZ system, but I like things to work fast, not be bogged down with decompressing music, etc." (Jon Hall)

Which is funny because the effect was important on a 100MHz Pentium, but pretty much negligible beyond that.

I had a Toshiba Libretto 30 with a 486DX processor at 100MHz that was exactly on the boundary. It could play MP3s, but only with the Fraunhofer codec: WinAMP was not quite fast enough.

It was a lovely little machine that I set up to dual-boot Linux. If it had had mobile networking it would have been fantastic.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#133

"I do not tend to listen to music through my workstation, since that both distracts me and wastes cpu power. My workstation is a dual CPU, 500 MHZ system, but I like things to work fast, not be bogged down with decompressing music, etc." (Jon Hall)

I remember when I had a ~100mhz Cyrix 4/586 clone that I used to do desktop publishing (Photoshop, Quark, etc) in the mid-late 1990s. Plenty fast for that, but it could on play 128kbps MP3s if nothing else was running. I would have a tape deck hooked up to to the audio out so I could make cassette tapes for my car from MP3s. That got replaced with a actual 166mhz Pentium MMX. That one had no problem playing MP3s alon…

That last sentence brought back some memories for me, like when the ABIT BP6 motherboard came out (it was the first of its kind). I just HAD to have one, so I got one and stuck a pair of 500 MHz Celerons in it. That thing was sooooo faaaast! It was so much more powerful than my previous machines (a 486SX/25 w/ 4 MB of RAM and then a P100 w/ 32 MB of RAM)! I remember putting it together and wondering "how am I ever going to use this machine at anything near its full potential?"

This is a great reminder (to me) that, even though it doesn't seem like it sometimes, technology really does change so damn fast.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#134
I find it remarkable how little my "desktop" has changed since 2002. Like most of the people sampled I've got a browser up which has HN, mail, newsblur, pinned and then a bunch of tabs that have opened up as a result of those three. And counting I've got 11 Term2 windows up across the two screens and my laptop screen. And one really slow app I have to run talk to some enterprise apps but pretty much a browser and xterms is all I need for the most part to do work.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#135
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite miss the brushed metal look. It is interesting that you could take OSX from back then and put it in front of someone today and it'll behave mostly the same. Sadly the same could not be sad about mainstream Linux environments (GNOME3, Unity etc.) or Windows 8/10. Windows 10 you can to some extent. Thought provoking.

> Windows 10 you can to some extent. Only compared to Windows 7 or Vista maybe. Definitely no compared to, NT4/Me/2000/XP from back then. > Sadly the same could not be sad about mainstream Linux environments I'm still wondering what the Unity/Gnome/KDE devs smoke. From what I've gathered from Gnome users, the only way to make it bearable is by ripping out half its functionality and replacing it with (Gnome-specific)…

The more worrying thing about Gnome is that by being in large part done by RH employees, their antics are not confined to the DE. Over time it has dug itself deeper and deeper into Linux user space, and will probably dig itself into the kernel once Torvalds steps down as maintainer.

As best i can tell, they want to create something like a hybrid of OSX and Windows. OSX up front, and Windows in the back (to be comfortable to all those MSCEs around the corporate and government offices).

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#138
post #6

So both creators of C used Windows...

Only insofar as they used them as gateways to other machines. Ritchie was on a Plan 9 box, and Kernighan was in other various machines via X

That's not completely true.

Some anti-Microsoft types (about 15 or 20 years ago) were outraged after it was pointed out that (according to the headers of the posts) Ritchie's posts to the 9fans mailing list were being sent from Microsoft Outlook.

Maybe the lesson here is that people who accomplish a lot tend to be pragmatic?

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