I like the little typo ... c://

Yeah, I'm well aware. But how much of my time would it take to get a bunch of windows software running smoothly on Linux?

I do appreciate the offer of personal help, that's an extremely generous offer to an internet stranger. Sincerely, thank you!

Was but theres no reason to keep doing that

I like that idea bit it'll never fly. That software is an asset. A bankrupt company needs every asset to be sold to cover as much percentage of their debt to their vendors as possible.
I've been in a company that went bankrupt and I've been the vendor of a company that went bankrupt. Being the vendor was the harder experience.

New ones probably use something newer. The 20 year old elevator in a hospital will only be upgraded if something breaks.

Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.

Tbh I think you're letting nostalgia blind you to XP's flaws a little.

If they kept refining Win7 it would've been great.

Man, remember when people used to break into offices to steal the RAM?

My work experience in around 1995 was spent at a local computer firm.

At one point a group of men in balaclavas showed up, the boss stopped playing Doom long enough to cover the security camera and hand over a bunch of crumpled banknotes, and I was handed this pile of SIMMs to put in a test rig to make sure they were OK to sell.

I also had to straighten the pins on used/stolen 486 CPUs, and pretty sure at one point was taken to break into a warehouse. There was certainly nobody else in the whole building, and we loaded the van with a bunch of cheap looking boxes before taking them back to HQ.

The boss was also banging a girl in my class, which in later years I learned makes him a paedo. Times sure were simpler in 1995.

aside from radio shack and texas instruments that i used at camp, i think i was sadly too young to do anything but windows 3.1 our first computer was a tandy sensation in the early 90s and i didn't really play with linux until maybe the mid 2000s

except for playing with apple IIe and radio shack computers through school and camp, that is.

MS DOS 6.6 for me - I enjoy the power of a 286 processor and much smaller instruction sets.

Yup, also especially for industrial applications, requirements and needs absolutely can change, and that means having to work around the equipment. I have seen firsthand the experience of trying to get new features into ancient applications. (Made worse by the fact that we took on support for it because the original company which had created the program had gone under).

Never thought I'd miss Ballmer, but here we are.

Technically, they did, and it was not great.

I've been trying tk get family to switch to Linux, but some are irrationally attached to MS Word. I wonder if Office 2003 will run in Wine?

and how to use is safely.

Such as by disconnecting the ethernet and power cables

Yeah. Its a gross feeling isn't it?

TRS-80 and TI 99/4A presumably?

Everything beyond the Dewey decimal system is/was pretty unnecessary, imo. We created a way to organize and "quickly" locate information stored in a physical format.

The near complete lack of manual labor has had many long reaching effects on society.

I type this on my brand new flagship phone...

Depends on what software. Anything that happens in the browser works. A lot of other software can be run using Wine. There is some software which still has problems especially when using USB ports as serial ports etc. and a lot of subpar software (un)fortunately just doesn't work because of it being badly programmed.

They lost me when they removed the start button on the left side of the taskbar in version 8.1 (I think it was) to... Be cool with the kids (I think 8.1 was supposed to be touch screen friendly)? I don't even know, but I went back to Windows 7 for a long while.

The backlash with the start button was so huge that they put it back on the taskbar in Windows 10 (at least mine has it and is the reason I got Windows 10). I'm currently refusing to update to Windows 11, because it apparently crashes when playing certain video games and I'm not about to have the other trash bugs that come with it, which I've been seeing posted on Microsoft help forums when I search for Windows 10 related questions. Fuck that noise, I don't want to deal with it.

There's not particularly good reason to stop doing it in that scenario either.

You have an offline technology stack in that elevator that has been doing the job correctly for 20 years. Why take on the expense and risk of changing things that aren't currently broken?

It would be crazy if you are building new to resort to that stack, but for an established elevator, why bother?

Same for some old oscilloscopes at work. I'm not crazy about the choice but I can hardly suggest it would be practical to change it while the oscilloscopes still do their function.

I would say it's a problem if the stack is online, but if it is self contained, the age of the software doesn't make it a problem in and out itself.