word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz)

On Thu, 7 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote: I'll pile on, too. I'm always grumbling about monitors that use some kind of super-crap algorithm to scale the bitmap (bicubic smear-a-polation). Lord have mercy, just give me the damn pixels on 1/3rd of the monitor and give me the *option* to scale it if I want. Why is it so hard to understand that nobody wants to run an LCD in it's "non-native" resolution. It always looks like crap! Well, there is a bright side to this, also. When you run older OSes or app software on new modern hardware, it's amazingly fast. I guess the key is to upgrade your hardware and just ignore most "advancements" in software. However, I'm sure most folks just head-nod at the normal pat-response: "But but but, you won't get security updates!" My response is that if a modern "IT guy" can't figure out how to put that system behind a firewall and properly take steps to version-lock the environment: fire him. He's a shill for the Evil Ones trying to sell us all tickets on the upgrade train with a free side of snake oil. Defense in depth means you *can* defend at multiple points, not just rely on the vendor to constantly give you blind binary patches for the OS and call that "good". Yet, when I talk about version locking as a set of procedures, people often don't even know what I'm getting at. They haven't even been introduced to the idea and only know the corporate refrain of hyper-upgrade-orthadoxy. It's a real accomplishment for the software industry, really. I can't think of any other instance where fat-cats are easily convinced to spend vulgar amounts of money on things that actually don't add squat to the bottom line. Is there that much peer pressure at the country club? Are the sales reps really *that* hot? On a related note, even though I have an Amiga 3000, I often use UAE because it's just so damn fast. It's fun, sometimes to see The Last Ninja at 1000 FPS. :-P -Swift