31–40 of 100 posts
"I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn’t – it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."
As for the alleged Bill Gates quote, I read somewhere (Deep C Secrets by Peer van der Linden, I think, but I am too lazy to look it up), that "640k ought to be enough for anyone" did not mean that it was enough for anyone for all times. I am not a fan of Bill Gates, but he is not stupid. And at the time he - allegedly - said it, 640k of RAM was (for a single user!) was indeed a lot! Compare that to the 64k of the C64…
I worked at a textile company 17 years ago and the bought brand new "state of the art" embroidery machines from Germany and they ran Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. At the time I was just "the web and IT guy" so it was my job to set up a token ring network with coaxial cables to network these machines together so the control computer could send embroidery designs remotely. This was cutting edge stuff, prior to that we had 3.5" floppies and a sneaker net.
But even at the time Windows 3.11 was 8 years old. To this day it is the only time I have seen token ring. I have "fond" memories of walking through hundreds of feet of coax checking each connection to find out which one came loose and took the entire network down.
DOS is only "real time" if you don't do disk I/O. Disk I/O is synchronous. There's something to be said for using FreeDOS simply as a loader for a real-time control program. It's not doing anything in the background. There's no networking stack. There's no way to attack it without physical access.
I love the idea that there's still an active community developing for old hardware. Specially on videogames since many times they apply modern design ideas in very old hardware. As a dumb example I saw a platformer for the ZX spectrum not long ago, where the falling speed was not linear but accelerated, which may seem trivial now but back then was something really unusual and I didn't realized how big was the differe…
And a guy in Texas recently released a very interesting looking Ultima IV-style game for the Commodore 64.
As for the alleged Bill Gates quote, I read somewhere (Deep C Secrets by Peer van der Linden, I think, but I am too lazy to look it up), that "640k ought to be enough for anyone" did not mean that it was enough for anyone for all times. I am not a fan of Bill Gates, but he is not stupid. And at the time he - allegedly - said it, 640k of RAM was (for a single user!) was indeed a lot! Compare that to the 64k of the C64…
> the freshly installed system boots up in about 30 seconds, including the BIOS doing its thing. Honest question/clarification, is that... considered fast? My DOS system used to boot that fast. A C64 is almost instant. And my old ~2013 Chromebook boots in ~7 seconds into Linux with an eMMC drive (slower than an SSD but still fairly fast). It's only got 2 GB of RAM so when it hits swap it'll bog to a standstill so it'…
Booting from ROM is one thing. Loading something from tape, that's another story.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does this myth keep getting pushed - by tech people no less? Bill Gates emphatically denied ever saying it and no one has ever come forward with a scrap of evidence he actually said it.
Guess: it was perpetuated because lots of tech people hated him and what he did to the industry and to computing progress in general. He has since gotten way, way better PR handling though. Just look at the way Reddit absolutely adores him nowadays (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs). Heck, even on HN there's enough young people who have no idea how much this one individual repressed computing progress ov…
Back then, you could just deny something happened, and often get away with it because you weren't being surveilled 24 hours a day.
It's like when someone very knowledgeable about a subject posts information on Wikipedia. Even if they were there first hand; even if they were personally involved with the event; even if they wrote magazine articles about it and did radio interviews about it, and it was covered by television — if it happened before 2000, it'll get erased from Wikipedia by someone on the other side of the planet because there's not a web link or an ancient library book to cite for "proof."
/Yes, I'm speaking from experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess: it was perpetuated because lots of tech people hated him and what he did to the industry and to computing progress in general. He has since gotten way, way better PR handling though. Just look at the way Reddit absolutely adores him nowadays (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs). Heck, even on HN there's enough young people who have no idea how much this one individual repressed computing progress ov…
Another guess: He actually said it and a few people heard it, but when he said it was before everything in the universe was constantly being recorded, photographed, and pushed to the internet, so there's not necessarily a record of it. Back then, you could just deny something happened, and often get away with it because you weren't being surveilled 24 hours a day. It's like when someone very knowledgeable about a sub…
Sort of related:
It's a bit distressing, in away, how hard it is to access information from before like year 2007. Most of it is locked up in government reference libraries and you generally have to bonafide "researcher" to even access physical copies of publications. Oh, and it's not allowed to make copies of the material.
Thanks a lot, Disney.
If you are looking for a truly minimalist OS for your PC, DOS is for you. I have a warm feeling when I try to imagine an HPC compute node running DOS instead of a fat OS with all the overhead that comes with it. I know, it sounds like a pipe dream, but wouldn't it be nice if there was something like DOS that is natively 64-bit and also supports multiprocessing and multithreading - basically, something that turns a ma…
What would you do on the system as soon as you need to look something up though? Even though it's easy to look something up via smartphone, if the code snippet is more than a sentence, do you really want to retype the whole thing rather than just copy and paste?
It's a very romantic notion though, and there's even a kickstarter for the writer's version [1], and I recommend setting up a system like that as a fun weekend project, but (at least for me) it turns out, through years of (mis)training, those 30 browser tabs I have open are an important part of my workflow, so I need an operating system that allows for that, in order to be productive (and unproductive) on a day-to-day basis.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/astrohaus/hemingwrite-a...
Bill Gates never said "640k ought to be enough for anybody." https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syst...
Why does this myth keep getting pushed - by tech people no less? Bill Gates emphatically denied ever saying it and no one has ever come forward with a scrap of evidence he actually said it.
Same reason plenty of people still believe in the Loch Ness Monster or that Crop Circles were made by aliens.
Some people are hopelessly refractory to critical thinking and will never change their mind, no matter the evidence presented to them.