29 Sep
2005
29 Sep
'05
3:13 p.m.
Rumor has it that Tom Jennings may have mentioned these words:
Eh. Dump the 10 year rule and cut off at 1994.
Sure, but then my Amiga wouldn't be classic anymore. It was built in '98.
Oh, wait, then it still isn't, even *with* the 10-year rule. :-/
When the computer-user count became in the millions
it's
simply not the same.
OK, then that would rule out Commodore 64 (several million sold) the Tandy
Model 100's (several million sold) and even Ataris & Tandy CoCos.
We were *well into* millions of users by '84, not '94.
pretty much ANY
computer from the 70s and even 80s is "interesting".
But what about the 90's?
Seriously - let's look at this:
When I joined the list, CoCo 3s weren't technically ontopic yet, as they'd
been sold until '92. (Disco'ed in '91, I think I saw one (still in a RS
store) in '93.
When I joined the list, Macintoshes *still couldn't* multitask; 8-bitters
could do that since '81-82 (whenever OS-9 was released). Yet lots of people
are still waxing poetic about 68K Macs - I found them udderly[1] pitiful...
much less useful for the power available than my NT4 workstation. Granted,
I wasn't doing photo editing or typesetting; just the basics.
[[ dons flameproof knickers... I'm not saying that Macs sucked, but I was
rather disheartened when I finally had access to a Mac, that every other
sentence I said started with "whaddya mean it can't..." What it could do,
it did very well; but as a general-purpose computing platform, the OS was
rather lacking. ]]
Pretty much
anything post-MSDOS is deadly dull -- with exceptions of course.
And *who* gets to choose which exceptions are acceptable? That's the
"slippery slope" we must climb, and why these "ten-year-rule"
arguments
come up every 6 months or so...
Consistency is for machinery.
And yet, it's the human inconsistency that keeps us rehashing the subject
ad nauseum... :-/
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
[1] Not a typo - I rather thought they were "suckin' hind teat" if you
catch my drift. ;-) After using OS-9 Level 2, with multiple hardware &
software windows, and being able to recalculate a spreadsheet, spellcheck a
document and play Rogue (albeit somewhat slowly) at the same time - I
really missed that ability when I started working with MacOS. (And yes, to
be fair - MS-DOS & it's ilk as well.)
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com |