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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 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq