Froedlich

Like most people who bought into the OS/2 hype, I bailed after 1.3.

I have been porting sections of the business software I mentioned earlier from QuickBASIC on DOS (nice to have the source code!) to Tcl on Linux using ChatGPT to automate the conversion. It gets it right the first try, almost every time.

The BASIC code is very simple by modern standards, and Tcl overlaps BASIC neatly, making conversion easy.

Unfortunately it's just a short-term stopgap to add some features management suddenly can't live without, that weren't practical to implement in BASIC/DOS. They'll replace the whole stack with a commercial product and support contract when they find something they like.

I still have a circa-1996 486 running Windows 95. It has an EPROM burner card and software that I use to reprogram the ECM in my car.

The cost of upgrading to modern software and hardware is substantial, plus the learning curve for something I only do rarely nowadays.

A friend works for an airline as a flight simulator tech. Their entire software stack, including the compiler and OS, is FAA-certified.

Then their ancient Honeywell(?) mainframes reached end-of-life they scouted for compatible hardware, of which there was none. The cost of certifying new software, plus the time involved, was astronomical. So, after consulting with the FAA, they paid a hardware company to clone the ancient mainframes in modern silicon. The FAA signed off on it, and they had all-new computers - much smaller than the originals - running the old stack.

Me!

I have a client with some business software that runs on DOS. They have a dozen seats. A single Linux server gives serves a dozen VNC sessions with the software running in DOSEMU. Printing is done with the Linux print stack and three Ethernet print servers.

It has been working without a hitch since 2008. Oh, so has the server, which is a VirtualBox VM.

Managers might want solutions, but to get to them you have to go through HR, which wants checkboxes ticked.

That's two entirely different screening processes.

Borland Quattro.

Yep. Boston Dynamics has been dependent on military contracts since their founding in 1992.

The "no more military weapons" statement seems to have been after they were acquired by Hyundai.

Boston Dynamics' business is, basically, "mobility platforms." After all these years the basic development is all done; now they're pivoting to commercial markets.

There's no real difference between a "murderbot" and, say, a police riot-control platform, a fire-fighting platform, a forestry platform, etc.

They might not be explicitly developing weapon packages any more, but there are plenty of other companies who will be happy to take the money to build them onto Boston Dynamics' platforms.

We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas) and it had no commercials.

A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it.

Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...

Sage Accounting is prone to various connectivity gollywobbles between the server and workstations. The first troubleshooting recommendation is to turn off IPv6. About 75% of that time, the problem then goes away.

I don't own anything with a fingerprint scanner. My phone has a camera, but I don't use a phone for internet.

If the AI does spelling and grammar fixups, I'll root for the AI.

When I was in corporate IT, I got way too much internal email that looked like it had been pecked out by an autistic second-grader, with random spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Which wasn't as much of a problem as the chain-of-consciousness blather of jumbled words that often made no sense at all.

Some of those people were Ph.Ds in charge of multimillion-dollar subsidiaries and dozens or hundreds of employees, but they may have well have been trying to communicate by interpretive farting and tap-dancing.

Back in the (early 1960s?) Isaac Asimov wrote a book on how to do arithmetic calculations in your head. He pointed out that someone who developed that skill could solve problems faster in their head than by reaching for a slide rule, and they wouldn't necessarily be limited to slide rule approximations. Engineers, accountants, etc. would be more productive by being able to do calculations without having to reach for a slide rule or pencil and paper.

[pause for 'slide rule' chuckle]

The same applies to "open calculator app and key the figures in," though. I'm not sure that "user interface" was a thing back when he wrote that, but that's what he was talking about.

I'm another who never stopped. I still use matchbox-sized MP3 players, replacing them when they die. Wifi is sparse in my area, and even cellular signals are unreliable (and expensive), so I stayed local-only.

The little players also have discrete "stop" and "volume" buttons or rockers, which means I can pause or adjust volume without having to see the player. Much better than hauling a phone out and spend time navigating menus.

Nobody ever says a word to me, unless I have the earbuds in; then complete strangers will walk up and start talking. Pause the player, remove an earbud, ask them to repeat what they said; they get angry. The usual.

I understand the "everybody does it that way" aspect of the cloud, but the old way of subscribing to a dynamic DNS and hosting locally still works just fine and you have full control of things.

Later, once you have more traffic and/or paying customers, it would be worth looking into cloud hosting. And even then, you probably don't need as much horsepower as they're trying to sell.

A friend of mine is getting ready to retire after 30-odd years in IT. He has already tooled up and trained for his retirement profession: farrier; the guy who makes and installs horse shoes. It's more profitable than it used to be since few people do it any more, and farriers typically work on their own schedule.

The pool of tech jobs in my area was sparse, but the local employers were fully on board with the big-city "use them for a while and toss them out" system. So when times were good in IT, I bought a machine shop, and in between times of lucrative IT employment, I did short-run metalworking and engine rebuilding.

I'm mostly retired now, and my paying work involves maintenance on proprietary inventory and billing software written in a 1960s language in a dialect that became unsupported in the mid-1980s. And it runs in MS-DOS.

I've mostly set aside the languages and tools I used to use, and I'm learning Haiku's variant of C++ to write some native-mode Haiku application software.

My development is on Linux. Some of my work has to run on Windows as well; VirtualBox has several Windows VMs, a ReactOS VM, and Wine for testing.

I've never had to deal with the BSDs or Macs. If a customer was willing to pay for me to come up to speed on either of them I would consider it, but I have no interest otherwise.

I am slowly coming up to speed on Haiku, and now that most of my application and development software runs on Haiku and its hardware compatibility is much better, I'm looking to eventually move from Linux to Haiku for my primary workstation.

> Just speak clearly. ---

I finally got (very expensive) hearing aids, and made several trips back to the audiologist to have them tuned. Then I wound up not wearing them, because most people think they're speaking English, but it's some kind of mumbly slobbergobble with incorrect, missing, or mispronounced words. The aids just turned "mufuh dogga baytaaa" into "MUFUH DOGGA BAYTAAA."

Yeah, I heard that just fine without electronic assistance.

Paying attention to how often people with "normal" hearing said "what?" to each other was a revelation. Yes, I have a problem. But it's a small problem; the big problem is that a large number of people may as well be trying to communicate by interpretive farting and tap-dancing, because "the words what are coming out of their mouth" are mostly gibberish.

Please don't inflict Gnome upon them.

If it was local - implanted, or on my body, it might be a useful tool with the correct training.

If it was networked, it would need to have much tighter security than the current internet.

If it was just a terminal to some corporate server running unknown software for purposes I wouldn't necessarily agree to, nope, nope, nopity-nope. Even if it didn't start off as a device for pushing propaganda and advertising, there's no realistic expectation that it wouldn't evolve into that over time.

Sounds like Jeff Duntmann's "jiminy", which he wrote about in PC Techniques magazine back in 1992. A matchbox-sized general purpose computer and life log, infrared connections to peripherals as needed, with a mesh network to other jiminies and the internet-at-large. Jeff didn't use the term "AI", but that would describe how it worked.

http://www.duntemann.com/End14.htm

Elon Musk's portable-Grok-thing is a long step toward the jiminy idea.

Windows Phone's UI is still with us, from Windows 8 onwards. Everything on 8, 10, and 11 is optimized for a touch interface on a small screen, which is ridiculous on a modern desktop with a 32" or so monitor and a trackball or mouse.

DESQview/X sucked the wind out of DESQview's sails. It was, on paper, a massive upgrade. I had been running DESQview for years, with a dial-up BBS in the background.

But you couldn't actually buy /X. After trying to buy a copy, my publisher even contacted DESQ's marketing people to get a copy for me, and they wouldn't turn one over. Supposedly there were some copies actually sold, but too few, too late, and then /X was dropped. There was at least one more release of plain DESQview after that, but by then Windows was eating its lunch.

I'm booting and running Haiku on my Thinkpad. It's a from-scratch workalike of BeOS, and able to run Be software. Though, frankly, Be software is totally 1990s, so a lot of Linux software written for Qt has been ported to Haiku.

In the end I wound up with basically the same application software as on my Debian desktop, except running on Haiku instead of Linux. Haiku is noticeably snappier and more responsive than Linux+X+Qt+KDE, though.

Wine predates ReactOS. It was basically a FOSS duplicate of Sun's WABI.

I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for ReactOS' lack of printing support.

As long as you stay within the ECMA or published Windows APIs, everything runs fine in Wine and ReactOS. But Microsoft products are full of undocumented functions, as well as checks to see if they're running on real Windows. That goes back to the Windows 3.1 days, when 3.1 developers regularly used OS/2 instead of DOS, and Microsoft started adding patches to fail under OS/2 and DR-DOS. So all that has to be accounted for by Wine and ReactOS. A lot of third-party software uses undocumented functions as well, especially stuff written back during the days when computer magazines were a thing, and regularly published that kind of information. A lot of programmers found the lure of undocumented calls to be irresistible, and they wound up in all kinds of commercial applications where they really shouldn't have been.

In my experience anything that will load under Wine will run with no problems. ReactOS has some stability problems, but then the developers specifically call it "alpha" software. Despite that, I've put customers on ReactOS systems after verifying all their software ran on it. It gets them off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. Sometimes there are compatibility problems and I fall back to Wine on Linux. Occasionally nothing will do but real Windows.

As a Linux user, I hated Flash with a passion. It mostly didn't work despite several Linux implementations. About the time they sorted all the bugs out, it went away. Good riddance.

I tried several "information management" and "knowlege management" programs over the years, but none of them worked the way I wanted.

My original method was a directory full of plain text files arranged by subject, that I brought up with my text editor.

Over the years I wrote a specification for a system tailored for my needs, that could manage different forms of media, notes, saved web pages, ebooks, and so forth. The spec grew until I set the project aside as more trouble than it was worth. In retrospect I wish I had kept going.

At the moment I'm using plain old hand-written subset of HTML linked to subdirectories arranged by subject. As time permits I will finish the (simplistic) custom browser, which will also let me annotate pages and edit files.

I have looked into some of the indexing programs that look inside files and index their contents in a searchable fashion. They all take a vast amount of storage space, probably because over the decades I have amassed a vast amount of data. After experimentation I decided to pass on the indexers as well. I have always managed things in a rigid hierachical arrangement, and it's pretty easy to find what I'm looking for. On the other hand, I know what's there and where I put it, which makes it easy for me. It would be much less useful for someone else.

Never underestimate the usefulness of a plain text file. It can be written, read, searched, and indexed by almost anything, should you wish to do so. Some of mine date back to the mid-1980s and MS-DOS 2.1, to OS/2 and Windows (briefly), Linux, and even Haiku. Every platform has subdirectories and some kind of editor; that's real portability. And if you ever have to deal with ancient machines that don't speak ASCII, much less UTF, there's probably some kind of conversion utility to let you move your files to IBM EBCDIC or DEC Sixbit.

If you're running emacs, the "org mode" add-in uses lightly-formatted text files organize data, which is then available within the editor. It's worth looking at if you're an emacs user, assuming you're not using org mode already.

LLMs remind me of the children's game "Telephone."