!Re: Nuke Redmond!

Please see embedded comments below. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Bruce Lane <kyrrin(a)bluefeathertech.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 11:59 PM Subject: Re: !Re: Nuke Redmond! about. Well, there's plenty of arrogance to go around. scale to There were plenty of other players on the scene. Just look at DEC. They wanted to make computers more costly, less convenient, less accessible. It's justice that they're history! They weren't alone in this and I expect some of the others, notably IBM, to go away eventually as well, though probably not as kindly as DEC went. They, at least, are working on bringing new technology to the market, rather than repainting the old stuff and trumpeting that the new color made it new technology. they're everyone Now if they had simply made their computers evolve beyond that point, particularly in the economic aspect. What did the complete computer cost in Y2K dollars? Include the OS, the rotating memory, etc, assuming you had nothing to start with. I never said they were perfect. Nonetheless, I see more NT boxes than VMS ones these days. which some I know a few who were pretty smart as well, but I never got to see them work. The ones I saw couldn't do what you describe, and probably would have had problems with any task. My experience with one client back in the early '80's when DEC was purporedly at its finest, was the DEC couldn't ship two identically configured systems. We had redundancy requirements and someone had designed hardware that figured out whether a given system was malfunctioning and discarded its outputs if they were wrong. (don't ask me how!) What was required was that two 11/44's be setup identically in every way, both hardware and software. That doesn't strike me as particularly challenging, but I guess it was. Ultimately, the two 11/44's, et al, were replaced with three APPLE-]['s. That was much more straightforward, apparently. the cards $10^7 last Well, if you're not willing to do what the other guy won't you don't deserve the big bucks. I've worked long hours nearly all my life and it's never made me rich, though. In retrospect, I should have learned to use VB, but I didn't want to be a programmer. know There is a large class of problems for which VB is the obvious solution. If you try to approach them with other tools they may ultimately be solved. These fellows to whom I referred don't get paid for solving the problem alone. They get paid for doing it QUICKLY. One very impressive case I remember was one in which one of my former business partners had worked on a project for nearly six months and looked like he was going to miss his delivery. In half a day with one of my former associates, for whom, incidentally, I had done work since then, showed him how to solve his entire problem, starting from scratch in VB, and consuming less than a day's effort. That doesn't say VB is wonderful, but it does say it's appropriate for some things, don't you agree? I like the old stuff because you have control of everything that went on. I also recognize that these old timers are still capable of doing lots of useful work. What's more, the direction in which PC hardware is headed suggests that the PC is no longer an appropriate platform for doing instrumentation, control, telelmetry, etc, as it once was. In another year or two, it will be a little pizza box or built into a monitor enclosure with just the I/O that the majority wants. That's the natural consequence of the PC having found its ultimate niche in the universe. One might say that the old S-100 systems were more broadly applicable than the PC systems of today, Microsoft was in them, too, however.