was RickRussellTX @ reddit

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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.

    It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.

    The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.

    • Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.

    • And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.

    I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.

    • Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.

    Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).

    The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.









  • It was never a question of being technically right or wrong. Linus’ realization was that his inflammatory language was viewed as permission by other people in the Linux community to be verbally abusive to their peers. People who had been valuable contributors to Linux projects explained to Linus how they had been berated by colleagues, and when challenged those colleagues cited Linus’ own language.

    What Linus wants is working code, and you don’t get working code by giving tacit permission to your most aggressive & abrasive community members to attack others.





  • Unfortunately it has weird issues with my bog standard Intel HP Omen laptop and a 2060 GPU.

    Basically any kind of sleep mode kills the GPU. I have go into Display settings and force a re-detect to wake it. Kind of a pain when you use the laptop connected to an external monitor with the lid closed.