12 Jul
2001
12 Jul
'01
3:56 p.m.
On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Tony Duell wrote:
We need to recognize, Tony, that there are a vast number of people out
there who firmly believe that if they are not running Windoze or Macos
that it is impossible to do anything productive.
- don
John Foust skrev:
IMHO, more clueful/knowledgeable people can do useful work on less
powerful computers.
For example, if I _had_ to, I could get useful work done using only a Z80
box running CP/M. I'd not want that as my only computer, but I'd find a
way to configure some kind of word processor to drive a printer and
produce reasonable documents. Sure it wouldn't be as nice as LaTeX, but
it would get the job done.
And I could certainly write useful programs on it to support my hardware
hacking type projects.
And I could certainly do useful work on just about any unix box, however
old. That includes all 386+ PCs that can run linux.
But most people can't. They can't write special software (which generally
_is_ requeired to use older machines -- there just aren't ready-written
applications for a lot of uses). They can't wire up special cables or
make interfaces to hook them up to other devices (like printers). Heck,
they'd even be lost if faced with a command line.... At 12:35 AM 7/11/01 +0100, Iggy Drougge wrote:
>>Compaq Deskpro 386 (forget how big the hard drive is)
>>IBM PC-XT
>>[...]
>Obviously, the best home for these are down in Africa or other particularly
>poor homes.
And why would they want them? Nothing's worse
than being poor,
and given something worthless by someone who thinks it'll help you.
Oh, come on, that's easy to say if you're from the rich world and have had
computers for twenty years. Even I would rather have a 386 than no computer at
all.