Re(2): [SunRescue] a sad, sad day

[Tim Hauber]

rescue at sunhelp.org,Internet writes:
>BTW: I always wonder where these millions of Apple Macintosh
>are... there are remarkably few in the dumpsters!

They are all quietly running doing the same stuff they did when they were
new.  The biggest disfavor that has ever occurred to the computer user is
the "PC" market push to always have more bells and whistles, so no
individual piece of software, OS included, is allowed to exist for more
than a year.  Instead of MS tuning Windows 3.x and fixing bugs, and adding
power, etc. they threw it out and made Win95.  Then they finally delivered
on the Win95 promise by releasing Win98, but in the meantime they had made
some significant changes under the guise of Internet Explorer 4.  There is
no foundation, so the software companies can never get past a couple of
versions before they have to port to a new API, and the marketers are the
only people that like it, because everybody has to buy a new copy of
everything every year or they will (shudder) "fall behind"  But outside of
the PC world, stuff lives much longer, has time to grow up and get rock
stable.  Even the Macs have traditionally moved much slower, unfortunately
I see signs of  increasing velocity there, but some of that is just Steve
undoing all the changes that happened while he was gone.  A Mac from 93
still does everything it did then, and there is a good chance that no one
has loaded some big fancy word processor that will start your car for you,
even though Claris Works is still all they need.

Yes I am ranting, but honestly, Allwrite on a TRS-80 Model 4 would do all
the word processing I need, and if I make a document that won't fit on a
180K disk then I have probably said more than I needed to.  

The same question applies to Sun3's, where are they?  they only end up in
dumpsters when some suit discovers that they are no longer manufacturer
supported, and they don't have a shiny holographic sticker on the front,
and that's the fate that kills all good computers.  If it were left to
Sysadmins, when a machine actually died it would become spare parts, and
when it was outgrown it would do some task he wanted to do, but didn't
have a machine to do it. 
Example: Macintosh LCII, a basically useless machine.  Why buy a big fancy
mail server so you can support several little domains, with the hassles of
virtual domains, when you have LCIIs sitting around that can run Eudora
Internet mail server for free?  I have uptimes approaching a year on boxes
like this.

Old hardware plus old software equals stability, especially for low volume
tasks.  Weren't DOS bulletin boards pretty solid before the death of the
BB?

OK, there's my Nickel

Tim