Modern Apps on Old Machines

At 02:52 PM 6/27/97 -0700, you wrote: I agree with you here, and games are fun, but that depends on what you like. I love the internet, and I learned ALOT from it. sure a shell account with lynx is nice, as I use it for fast FTP, but when I read about a PDP11, it is nice to see a picture of one, rather just text. I have dreamed of writing one, and I don't know if someone else has done it, and if they did, I would grab a copy right away. The main problem that everyone forgets is that having limited memory is a pain, and TCP/IP alone uses 64K in ONE SOCKET ALONE as a buffer. You have a good point there, and it would work sorta, but patience runs thin after awhile, as decoding images at 1 MHZ does take 1 min, times that with 10 or so inlines you will find at every web page, and waiting 10 mins for a page to load would make it a fustrating experiance. heck, on days where there is severe net lag (especially on fridays), it takes 10 mins for the data to arrive even for fast machines! <G> It is a cool idea though, and it would be interesting to see if this can be pulled off. You dont have to spend this much to have a fast PC (or MAC), all you need is to hunt around... AND NEVER BUY RETAIL SYSTEMS!!! like packard smell..... its not about apps, its about efficincy, and operator comfort. VGA or SVGA is worth it becuse it prevents eyestrain, and you can use your system for longer amounts of time. I used color TV's before when I got started, and serious word processing was painful to the eyes. RGB's are better, but not by much. also its about speed. The ability to cut and paste is underrated, as in serious work, it saves gobs of time. I love command line interfaces, as well as GUI's, but typing long commandlines to just load a directory, its nice just to be able to type LS -l and get the same result. and if you think about it, these nice classic machines we love EVOLVED to be the modern ones we got now, and I understand the resentment of microsnot, as I hate them too, but I can't understand the resentment of the modern machines. Yes some say they cost too much, but that can be solved. I see people go gaga over a PCjr, and while that make a nice collectors item, it is the least usefull home computer EVER made. and yes most apps used for home perposes dont need the latest and greatest, however, a modern machine is far more veratle in the power department, and the classics are more versatle in the hardware department. It is worth the time to develop the software when you need it only if the results are the same if you used somthing already out there on a capable machine. I wrote MANY small utilitys for the Commodore, simply because they did not exist in my area. and while it is fun to do it out of love, it does get tiring reinventing the wheel all the time. more time went into the devleopment than in actual use when it was done. I did write a budget/checkbook balancing program in BASIC, used it a few times, the it got bit rot, because i never had any money left to manage :) all in all, if the machine you use now does all what you want, thats great! but the day WILL come where you just need to have a feature that you have not got now. that is just the way the computing cookie crumbles.