[the_old_crowd] Re: Retro-game (OT)

[ewe2]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 07:08:24PM -0500, Rebecca Bowen wrote:
> >Kneasy
> <snip>
> >If you're not a Mac user - tsk, tsk, tsk.
 
Ah, platform envy! Back in the day I would hand-compile nethack for DOS just
to play it. There were DOS versions of emacs back then (virulent bloody thing,
I prefer Vim). It was games like Adventure and Zork that helped persuade me to
dual-boot Slackware in the ancient Linux days of 1993 :) Back then anything
remotely resembling BSD code compiled without too much fuss, so SunOS/4.3BSD
hacks of several venerable games made it into early Linux distributions. You
could actually recompile BSD Fortran versions of Adventure, but I doubt you
could now.


> >Geoff:
> <snip>
> >You may be encouraged to know that I am seriously giving thought to
> >upgrading to a Mac in the near future - not because of your
> >exhortation - but because my eldest son is
> >perverting/corrupting/persuading me against PCs. (Doesn't take much
> >doing - I still hanker after the good old days of teaching when we
> >standardised on Acorn Masters).

Try out a g4 or g5 from eBay before you commit serious money. Trouble is, I
don't think Apple hardware (apart from their excellent laptops) is going to
stabilize until after their second Intel platform. If you want to use the
latest OS X, you're going to want a g5 anyway.


> Rebecca, chortling:
> 
> During the Yankee swap at work week before last, the hottest item to play 
> for was an Atari 7800 (remember those?)  Mind you, those of us participating 
> in the swap are bonafide geeks of the first order who play with and develop 
> new technology all day long, every day. :) The guy who ended up with it took 
> it home - his son went wild over it and their family played tournament 
> Pacman all this past holiday weekend, practically ignoring the new Xbox 360 
> the father gave the son for Xmas.

I am the proud owner of a c64 and a c128d and have an external hard drive I
can interface with my linux PC to transfer the scads of disk images on the
net. It's the computing childhood I never had...of course I never caught the
Amiga disease thank heavens.

> As far as the Mac vs PC argument, they both have disadvantages - but I'd 
> take a PC myself.  Why?  I can always keep Windoze on one partition and a 
> blistering Red Hat hack attack on the other ;)  Both GE, who I worked for 
> prior, and my current employer eliminated them from the IT environment -  in 
> essence, Apple hardware support (replacement of failed hardware under 
> warranty) sucks bigtime, and we had loads of metrics to prove it with more 
> than 2000 Mac laptops and desktops in our midst at our current company 
> alone. Maybe it's different for home use, but for an enterprise environment 
> with a 3 year lifecycle (which is really good), that kind of service blows. 
> Least if a part fails on an IBM or Dell, I can have it from them the next 
> day, rather than 3 weeks.

I wonder how educational institutions cope, they have very strong penetration
here in Australian universities and are very popular with the engineering
crowd, oddly enough. The biggest problem seems to be the interesting way they
manage to break hardware with software upgrades which is pretty much the
opposite way in the PC world :) But dem's the breaks with proprietry hardware,
it's the same old scams that IBM invented. Will the industry ever grow up, I
wonder.

-- 
Just because we look like sheep doesn't mean we aren't penguins.