31 Oct
1998
31 Oct
'98
9:04 a.m.
Max Eskin wrote:
> It's not that weird. Everyone knows that 286 and 386 machines are
> crap ;) In fact, one reason is that noone gets attached to them, and
> also because Pentia aren't that much different from 386s. So, no
> nostalgia. And, I think that early PCs were a lot less useful than
> some other machines of the time (like Commodores and Apples)
The biggest problem these older machines had was microsoft operating systems.
(okay, I'm a Unix/VMS bigot at heart, but DOS and win3.0/3.1 really WERE that
bad.)
Part of what makes a machine appealing is how well you get along with the
OS. I've known DOS and win3.1 gurus, but I've never met anyone who really
LIKED these operating systems the way the apple-heads liked prodos and gsos.
Microsoft somehow managed to make these OSs without anything that endeared them
to their users and programmers.
As for 386s, there's the obvious linux plug waiting to happen, and I have to
say I'm fairly attached to Calico, my linux box, which is just a plain old
486/100 VLB machine. It's served remarkably reliably over the years.
Am I as attached to it as to the vaxen I used? No. Why? because Calico
is a hodgepodge of parts I picked up from surplus stores combined with a dx4
I bought while I was at Intel. (They used to have a great staff discount
program). It lacks the single unified personality of, say, a vaxstation 3100,
where every single piece either came from Digital or was at least built to
their specs so it *felt* like a Digital machine and *looked* like a digital
machine.
So how do I fit these two together? Um... er... Well, PCs never made friends
with people because of the bland (and poor) way they interfaced with people,
and because their bland (and frequently poor) hardware never had the unified
stamp that gives a machine an identity. They were engineered, both hardware
and software, to be generic computers. And I think the backlash from that
can be seen as part of (but certainly not all of) the driving force behind
the enormous number of I-Mac sales. Apple went to great lengths to make a
computer that IS different. That DOES have some personality to it. It
seems like this "personality" issue is becoming more and more important in
mass produced things - witness the new Beetle, the Imac, and so on.
Anyway, enough rambling for one message. :)
--
Jim Strickland
jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com
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