Microsoft's mysterious 'Windows Cloud' could be the second coming of Windows RT

PC World ^ | Jan 30, 2017 | Mark Hachman

[Bikkuri]

GAMES

Games (and great sponsorship/commercial spread). THAT is what kept it growing. I still had winblows (dual boot) to play games...

MS lost me when it was apparent that they were all for the $$$.. the monopoly that they deny they have (minus Mac.. I’ve hated Mac since around 1984.. envious at the time because they had better graphics (but still, at the time only black and white)). I learned my first REAL programming through Apple (Instant Pascal)... but I DID love being the only kid on the block that was the only person who could ‘fix’ peep’s PC problem.
MAN, how I miss the DOS days.. the only people who really messed with the PC were the ones who knew DOS (or UniX).

I swear to God.. there was 1 person, who was a co-worker to my father (around 1985, or so)... To any other person.. they could type in anything at the prompt and get an error.
This guy (he was police, btw :D) .. I got a call about once a week to come fix his problem... I swear, he could type in, “eat me”, and his PC would go nuts. He asked me, one time, if he could turn his PC to the side... was scared that the ‘bits’ would fall to one side. >.< (this is no joke!!)

I got in trouble one time because the server admin ‘thought’ his server (a Sheriff’s Office/county server) was secure. (This was about 1996)..
They were still using a UNIX server, but had a UI for use.. PCs were still in infancy, but for business there was always a UI. One night, I was bored and bypassed the UI to a UNIX command console .. :D connected directly to a BBS (dial up at the time, obviously)... and got a new hole added to my anatomy about a week later... and was asked by the sys admin how I did it.. :p
He thought that no one knew the commands on UNIX ... rotflmao (few realize that has been around since IRC ;^D)

Anyway... I DO miss DOS/UNIX days... back then, the only people who used computers knew what they were doing.
Sadly, I’ve forgotten much/many of the commands.

I haven’t paid for MS since XP.. I HAVE been a beta tester up until Win7.. after that, I asked to be released.

Besides games, Win has no use for me... I think/hope in the current situation (political and otherwise) people will slide over. (M$ has so much money now, not sure it will make a difference :p).. BUT, being that many indies are starting to male games (cross platform or otherwise), hopefully more will see the light ;)

I myself am quite happy with Mint KDE.. been using KDE since about 2011. It is a bit resource consuming, but we have practically full control of our own PC. (My opinion, Mint is the easiest install in this environment..).. As for the best DE, depends on the person (and we will never be able to go back to DOS/UNIX days).. but, I think you understand what I am talking about.

Mac/Apple.. still hate it, but it is more of a personal (fanboi) thing.. Ironic, being that it is ran on UNIX :D

Peace brother :D

[usconservative]

Loved your post.

One funny story to share among HUNDREDS I have over the years.

I was writing financial accounting and inventory management software for the Auto Industry between 1988 - 1991 (when the bottom fell out...)

Our software was written in QBasic and Pascal on the PC, and Apple's "Basic" (I forget exactly what it was called back then...) on the Apple II/IIe platforms.

For the PC and Apple platforms, we had two versions of the software: One that ran on a system with a FDD and HDD, and another that ran on two FDD's (and thus required occasionally swapping out floppy disks.)

We routinely added features to our software which meant sending updates out on a quarterly basis to our client base. As our client base grew and grew, the demands on our support staff also grew, almost exponentially.

I'll never forget one of our support staff near EXPLODING at one of our clients when he was asked for what may have been the millionth time "Where's the Any Key?"

Yes, we sent instructions out that we thought were simple and easy to follow when we instructed our clients to:

1. "Insert floppy disk into Drive A:
2. Type the command "Update" at the A:> Prompt and hit the ENTER Key.
3. When prompted to reboot the computer, remove the Update Disk from Drive A:> Insert the Program Disk and close the drive door. Then press any key to continue.

No shit, we were getting hundreds of calls every month asking where the "any key" was.

I assigned one of our maintenance programmers to the task of replacing the "any key" prompt from our update script to "ENTER Key." Had him do the same thing to all our software, meaning he had to manually comb through code to find "Press any key to continue ...." and replace it with "Press the ENTER key to continue ...." He also had to recompile every module in our software and re-test it to make sure the prompts were changed and we literally trapped for the ENTER key to be pressed to continue. All other keys failed and were programatically ignored. That eliminated almost every single support call asking "where's the any key?" because they all knew where the ENTER (or "Money Key" as they called it) was.

You know of course it's us Software Programmer's fault that end users are so f**king stupid, right? We've dumb'ed things down to the lowest common denominator and had to if we were going to survive.

Then there's the time I walked into a clients office and the owner of a very large car dealership network here in NE Illinois had his cup of coffee resting in the CD-ROM Drive Tray. He thought it was the greatest thing that he had a retractable coffee cup tray so he had a place for his cup of coffee on his very cluttered desk. I shit you not, that's true.

I didn't bother telling him what the retractable coffee tray really was, he was too stupid to get it.