[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Over the past weeks, I have been thinking about how far
we’ve come since the good ole’ days of the early 80’s and late
70’s, when using our computers was time-consuming and frustrating,
to say the least. (Have you ever tried to locate a program you
previously saved on cassette tape? Yes, I said CASSETTE tape.
Like the ones you play audio tapes on. That’s to say nothing about
loading it. If it was a fairly long program, you could take a
coffee break, and it would still be loading when you got
back.)”
“Approximately 5 years ago, I had the opportunity to buy OS/2 v.
2.1 at OfficeMax for the low price of $5. (Come to think of it, I
should have kept the 25 disks that made up OS/2. Ah, the things we
do in our foolish youth.) As I recall, when I loaded it up on my
AMD 386DX/40 (Now THAT was the hottest thing going in its day!) w/4
MB RAM. As I recall, it had a similar look to the Windows 9x
series, but with one little difference: It did NOT crash! Of
course, having a relatively slow processor helped (Heat-wise).”
“Which then brings me to my point. Why have we as a computer
industry accepted bloated and buggy software? Back in the day, you
could run a word processor in 16K of RAM. That’s 16,384 bytes of
RAM, not 16MB as in 16,384K bytes of RAM. Not to mention the fact
that the Amiga series did what Microsoft did, only a whole lot
earlier and a whole lot better. That OS could do in 2MB of RAM,
what Windows requires 16MB to do. Not shabby at all.”