[geeks] State of IT

[Dave McGuire]

On August 4, Tim H. wrote:
> There was a time when you Dave, even you, did not
> know that Unix/VMS/what the heck ever you run on PDPs was much more
> suitable than MS for any task which mattered.  Of course, in your case
> that might have been before you could type,but there was a time.  :-)

  Winodws 1.03 was current at the time.  It didn't suck nearly as bad
then as it does now, and Microsoft wasn't nearly the abhorrent band of
suited theives, liars, lawyers, and incompetent programmers they are
now.  Things have changed a lot since then.  Windows was never "good
stuff", but there was a time when it wasn't such "bad stuff".
Microsoft didn't really have much software available at the time.
Multiplan was ok, MBASIC was good (for a BASIC anyway), and Microsoft
C had a good optimizer, but WordPerfect v4.2 and Lotus 1-2-3 reigned
king and queen of the desktop market.

  For me at the time, it was RSTS/E v9.4 on a PDP-11/34a, and it was
more stable than even the great "comes-on-two-360K-floppies" and
"I-can't-crash-because-I-don't-actually-do-anything" MS-DOS v3.3.  I
once watched in awe as an MS-DOS machine spewed this error message:

Write protect error reading drive C:
Abort, retry, ignore?

          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                     "I haven't worn pants in 14 months!"
St. Petersburg, FL                                   -Pete Wargo