I joined the new century Options

[spare time toys]

We have been using a OLD HP computer for years. I have timed it and from when you turned it on it would take 5 minutes to get to the web. I hit the overtime hard the end of last month and treated us to a new iMac (IMG:style_emoticons/default/aktion035.gif) Man o man what a change (IMG:style_emoticons/default/type.gif) the letters show up on the monitor when I type them (IMG:style_emoticons/default/confused24.gif) I should have done this a long time ago (IMG:style_emoticons/default/slap.gif)

[Katmanken]

Old!

I worked on plug compatable products for 3270 mainframes, we watched the progress of the 8088 PCs come about because clients hated it when the mainframe went down and everybody was dead in the water.

We bought a small startup computer company and manufactured 286 and 386 computers. Back in those days you could have a motherboard, a 1.44 floppy and could boot the device and run Microsoft WORD off of a single floppy. And I could store all my word files on the floppy WITH the entire Word program. Took a little longer to boot, but that is how small of a system you really need to contain an operating system, a word processor, AND saved documents. I think my paperback dictionary cost 2 bucks. Yup, you don't need a huge operating system or a hard drive to run useable programs.

Nowadays we have huge operating systems, massive cache memory files, and monster hard drives so that we can be...

safe from hackers,

sales whores can insert programs to track our buying preferences on the internet (and tailor what we see),

music and video can insert huge amounts of tracking and copyright protections (DMR) in the operating systems, and

every software product can make their product more friendly by booting and running a part of their software product in the background so it starts up quicker.

If we could cut out all the unwanted resource sucking crap, it would be amazing how small and how fast systems would run. Microbloat Vista is a perfect example of adding more crap you don't want or need to force you to buy a bigger faster system.

Ken