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Re: [LUG] BBC Micro anyone anywhere anytime

 

On 17 May 2014 11:32, Gordon Henderson <gordon+lug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> blame us for just buying into it all at the time.

Very right and true for most values of "us".

Not for me though. I'm going to take this opportunity to give myself
the kudos and accolades I deserve for my conscientiousness in this
respect. I've bought for myself using my own money exactly one x86
machine in the last 26 years (and it's never even *seen* a M$ OS). I
don't know how many 68K, PPC and SPARC ones OTTOMH but basically all
the rest.

Of course I've bought-for-employers, specced, pre-sold, sold,
installed, configured, maintained and supported sickening numbers and
I guess 8 figures worth of Wintel shitboxen in the same period, but
always making it clear how bad this crap was, loudly and to the point
of being a real jerk about it (I have testimonials; available on
request).

As I think I may have mentioned, even when I worked for Compaq's
in-country distributor/retailer/VAR/rep and could get a 15% staff
discount on *the* best Wintel machines on the market, bar none,
including the first 486 24-bit-color "luggable" *and* get (then)
Netware Unix on it rather than 'Doze, I still popped around the corner
to my mates (and later colleagues) at the AppleCentre to buy my LC III
at full retail. What a *beautiful* machine, and that was during Jobs'
lost weekend; he was far from the only guy at Apple who "got" design
elegance. 68030 of course, with the 68040 mobo upgrade installed a few
months later. Think C, the original IDE, and still in some ways the
best -- still the fastest linker I've ever encountered, not that
anybody even knows what that is these days -- with the integrated
assembler and the ResEdit disassembler, and the sky was the limit. It
got so I could actually read and understand binary code rendered as
ASCII. Seriously. Well, a bit. C'mon now, what does ASCII 'Nu' mean in
68K assembler? Anyone?

-- 
Phil Hudson                  http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz
@UWascalWabbit                 PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63

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