there's a word for those people: awesome

windows xp was peak; running anything before xp is legendary

I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I've only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it's soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!

LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can't do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.

It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don't remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.

I ran Linux 1994ish. Amiga OS before. Amstrad CPC 464 before. A friend ran Sinclair ZX-80, that was the first system I had access to.

It really depends what its used for.

Anything that is public facing would never work without constant maintenance and upgrades, be it a computer OS or some complex piece of hardware.

"stuck" more like happy to not have to deal with the last 15-ish years of microsoft ruining everything they previously excelled at.

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.

I know it's not exactly the point of the article but for a lot of things, I reckon a good amount of 'innovation' was pretty pointless. I personally don't think I ever needed anything that Office 2003 can't do... (Of course I don't use any MS office to begin with but you get the point)

Why not? Still using Windows 7 on one of my ThinkPads. It's a solid system, if you know what you're doing and how to use is safely.

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

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.

I know it's not exactly the point of the article but for a lot of things, I reckon a good amount of 'innovation' was pretty pointless. I personally don't think I ever needed anything that Office 2003 can't do... (Of course I don't use any MS office to begin with but you get the point)

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!

"stuck" more like happy to not have to deal with the last 15-ish years of microsoft ruining everything they previously excelled at.

Was but theres no reason to keep doing that

There's still things like that on my workplace today. I think there's some older, rarely used CNC with Win98 on the controller. We just keep spares around when they break, but that's cheaper than replacing the whole machinery. Also there's some XP stations running software for an industrial machine which would cost quarter of a million to replace. Some of those need access to network drives and such but they live in a strictly isolated VLAN.

And, as far as I've told at least, there was no option at any point to upgrade just the computers on those things. It's always the whole assembly line or whatever they're connected to. There's not many companies willing to throw hundreds of thousands every 3-5 years to replace perfectly working equipment.

TRS-80 and TI 99/4A presumably?

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.

That's what I think too. And then I see "Their systems are built into everything around us", which basically only applies to PCs and laptops. What is built into pretty much everything around us, is GnuLinux.

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?