[roadcat]

I had a 40MB drive back in the day.

Funny how that was humongously big back then! I bought one of the first Apple II's when they came out, with 4KB memory. A large portion was used by the system, so I had tweak my assembly language programs to fit while leaving space for the running program. Blocks of memory were going for $500 per 16KB. Back then, choices were limited because of high costs. But everyone accepted having to tweak stuff to make things happen, unlike now with off-the-shelf total devices for the masses. Different world then.

Sorry to hear there are disrupters on Linux threads. I stopped working on Linux twenty years ago, because I got lazy trying to tweak it. (Actually, my mind got lazy trying to remember commands.) It was fun, though. Speaking of using old stuff, I still use an old dumb Samsung tracfone. Everyone else in my family has an iPhone, so what, I just use my Samsung for calls.

[zeugma]

You might want to give Linux a try again. If you go with one of the more user-friendly distros, very little tweaking is involved anymore. I’ve been looking at Mint as a distro for newbies. It’s pretty darn straightforward. If you have a decent amount of ram, the best way to try it out is in a VM. I use vmware a lot for testing things. It’s pretty slick, and the ‘player’ version is cool.

[TXnMA]

LOL! You "got into" the Apple even before I did. My first machine was a ][+, with a whopping 16K of Ram, and a Radio Shack cassette deck as my "hard drive"...

I bet you were one of us who used Peeks, Pokes and Calls -- for for our own hex assembler code subroutiness -- in contests to see who could write the fanciest program in a single 80-character line of BASIC code.. '-)

And, I definitely remember Woz's fragmented memory! My annual test of my growing self-taught skills was an ever-imoroving hires snow scene graphic with falling snow. For a flake to reach the ground, it had to traverse three separate areas of graphic memory (which was a good tutorial on the use of offsets in hex...). I developed an asymmetrical 3-pixel "shape" for my snowflakes, and applied random rotation to create a realistic "flutter" as they fell...

Actually, those were great days. I truly miss having machines over which the user had absolute -- down to the bit level -- control...