new fangled crapola

Wow Beagles, it  has even changed your font .  I have managed to keep microsoft from hijacking my computer to Windows 10.  For awhile there every time I turned my head around Windows 10 was loading.  I finally just turned off automatic updates from Microsoft.  I was warned that this would be courting disaster, but it's been about a year and nothing bad has happened yet.

My first computer, a Radio Shack TRS80, back in 1984, was good for playing games and programming.  I first programmed in college in 1965, punched cards and Fortran.  I didn't do well in the class but that was because I spent all my time with my beer drinking buddies.  In 1978 when I decided I should probably do something besides tend bar the rest of my life and went to the local Junior College punched cards were gone and COBOL was in.  There was also some Basic which was way cool and assembly which was such a pain in the ass that it was fun in a nerd way.

I have never been interested in computer games, but I loved programming on the TRS80.  It had a gadget connected to the tv to turn it into a monitor and you connected it to cassette recorder to save the programs you wrote.  There was a magazine which I subscribed to religiously.  The attitude of the magazine was that the TRS80 would be the wave of the future.  Mostly it was games that people wrote in Basic, hundreds of lines of code that you could type into your computer and save on cassette tape, but they never ran well because any little typo in a few hundred lines of code would kill it.

I got the TRS80 when my friend who had owned it before stepped up to the Commodore 64 which was so cool it even had a printer.  There were several brands of toy computers around in that day, and then IBM came out with the PC Jr.  It had DOS, but no hard drive.  You booted it up with the DOS disk inside the drive, then removed it, and put in your say, Lotus 123, disk to do spreadsheets and them if you wanted to save that spreadsheet you had to take out the Lotus 123 disc and put in a data disc to save it on.  But its version of Basic was super keen.  I made up a baseball game and set the Cubs to playing the Cardinals in the world series and went out to lunch and when I came back it was over and I had four to seven box scores to show for it.

It had either an 86 or a 186 processor, then came the march of the 86s, 286, 386, 486, and then the 586 which they called the pentamax, and maybe a pentamax 2 or 3, and anymore they don't talk about chips.  It used to be when I bought a new computer I would check out  the chip, the internal memory, maybe the HZ, some kind of measure of speed, and the size of the hard drive, anymore I just get what is cheapest.  I had a laptop before this one, but it just sat on the table like a desktop so where was the advantage?  I think it was an HP as is my current one, an odd one where the cpu is slapped behind the screen, but I liked the keyboard and it was cheap.

I feel for you Beagles but I don't know if I can help you.,  I got one of those superphones maybe a month ago, and I can barely use it.  Back in the day the computer sat there and waited for you to do stuff, anymore it is always trying to do stuff for you and it makes me nuts.