They don't build things like they use to, can thank marketing research for that.

Why would anyone wanna sell you one computer for the rest of your life... (But they're not the only humans! :banghead:) or; with open sources and todays hardware we can pass our pc to the kids and they can pass it to their kids.

When we hear about companies like in (e.g.) the auto industry buying patents just to lock them up putting them on a shelf,,, we should second guess patent laws? And, work around (whenever need be)them as we do! ;)

Even with Linux, you can't run a PC forever. My first PC had 32 MB of RAM and a 500 MB hard drive. What kind of Linux could you run on that today?

In the "early" days of hard drives with gigabytes of storage, I can recall a friend exclaiming something like, "Why would anyone ever need that much disk space?!".

I believe it was Bill Gates who made that now infamous statement to the effect that no one would ever need more than 1MB of system RAM. That's why early x86 was so linited in that respect.

I don't remember how much I paid for the BIG 40MB hard drive (which had to be partitioned into two drives) in the second computer I bought, but I do remember paying $200AU for the 1MB RAM.

It had just enough to run windows 3 provided I didn't try to use any applications, so I doubt using KDE to do anything useful would have been a success.



Edit: fixed grammar.

I had heard it was about 640KB, but here's a link, which in turn points to wikiquote, and there's plenty of debate there. Also, you can find plenty of stuff elsewhere about the whole issue, as well as debate about what other comments Gates may, or may not, have made.

https://www.computerworld.com/articl...y-say-it-.html

I also seem to remember there being talk of it being a myth or urban legend.

However DOS had an imposed limit of 1M (640k of that being what was free for programmes, the rest being system reserved - the high memory), but the 80286 CPU could actually address 16MB of RAM (and the 80386 could address the same 4GB as any other 32 bit CPU). So I'm not convinced it was the chip manufacturers setting those kind of limits, as Gates has said.

himem.sys and emm386.exe allowed loading drivers for hardware such as a mouse, sound card and CDROM drivers and the MS CD extensions into high memory to free up more of that 640k and access to XMS (the memory above 1MB). But all of this was workarounds for DOS' limitations as an 8 bit operating system running on 16 bit or 32 bit processors.

From my perspective it was Microsoft and it's DOS operating system imposing these limits rather than intel.

Does anyone still remember when we were using XP and it was like the biggest thing around, the M$ came out with VISTA and no one took any notice of it and some even trashed it. So rumours had it that M$ deliberately made viruses to destroy WINDOWS XP computers so that people would be forced to use VISTA. I never really understood "Windows Defenders", to me windows has no defense.

i remember when XP came along, and i flipped out, went looking for alternatives to my win98, winNT and win2000 (yuck).

blew my mind how anyone liked that insane garish bloat foisted upon them.

so glad M$ did that though. without such bad moves, i'd not have found the wisdom of richard stallman, the GPL, etc. :) thanks for the suck. ;)



(not just rms & gpl, those are just the most compelling towering examples. many free software advocates, many inspirational freedom-preserving/conferring licenses, and in the "etc", i mean to include all the Free Software itself, and the distributions thereof, and all the development, and all the community.)

:)

----------------------

same with from 98 to 2000 to XP.

part of their planned obsolescence.

... which reminds me: https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://fuckmicrosoft.com/ had some escape-instrumental insights and historical facts.

I never used XP. I liked Windows98, but when I looked at the XP desktop, I said, "Oh no! That's not for me." So I stuck with W98 for a while and then switched to Linux.

On PCs I liked Daisy Unix and OS/2 in the old days. We needed Daisy for the CAD application, but it wasn't very stable. The only Windows app I liked was Flight Simulator. I still have a Windows 3.1 486 system in case I need to read an old HDD or floppy.

Microsoft didn't need anyone to create viruses to crash XP. The software was excellent at doing that itself.

There is a theory around that Microsoft didn't do anything to make their system more secure against malware because it actually played into their hands when it came to selling updates. Once they had end-of-lifed the old version, the antivirus manufacturers ceased to support it and users had no choice but to upgrade. If it hadn't been for the threat of viruses, those users might have just continued indefinitely with their existing installation because the new version would almost certainly require new hardware and they might not have wanted the expense.

I've been using Cairo Shell for a week now and it is much shinier than anything I've ever seen in the Linux world. Ha!

Pay or make it our self? The world is multiplying to hell with handbaskets, not a question of growing your own if you're not allowed?!.

Revolution?
Patent pending. :p

People need to eat let's not put cardboard in their food?
Mass produce software sources; i.e: intelligence, not mass produced software and monotony!

Me relinquishing the m for an upside down agnet in the sand... :hattip: