[rescue] A bit of Fun

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 03:35:10PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> > 2. Worst Processor
> 
> The obvious whipping boy here, IMHO, is the 80286.  Intel had a great
> opportunity to fix the mistakes made in the design of the 8086 while
> maintaining a backward compatibility mode ... and they STILL screwed the
> pooch.

The 80268 and 80386 both peeved me.  Both were good chances to fix
things, but they didn't.  But the 80286 was worse because you could
enter protected mode, but you couldn't leave it.  Thus, I never heard of
a single program that used 80286 protected mode, except OS2.

> > 3. Worst Operating system
> 
> I'm actually inclined to nominate pre-System7 MacOS for this.  I've
> never seen such appallingly primitive memory management in anything else
> contemporary.  And I don't care HOW many usability "experts" Apple threw
> at the design, I still say that single-fixed-menubar design was
> ass-stupid.  If I had a buck for every time I've had to help a user who
> couldn't launch an application because "I've got nothing running, but my
> Mac says it's out of memory!" and when I get there, the user has five or
> six or more applications running in the background, and *doesn't know
> they're there* because the OS gives no visible sign that they're still
> running after the user closed the last window ....

Though, it was only with Multi-finder that one could cause that
problem.  It would have been so bad if they would have figured that if
an application has no windows open, then perhaps it should be shut
down.