Froedlich

Like most people who bought into the OS/2 hype, I bailed after 1.3.

I have been porting sections of the business software I mentioned earlier from QuickBASIC on DOS (nice to have the source code!) to Tcl on Linux using ChatGPT to automate the conversion. It gets it right the first try, almost every time.

The BASIC code is very simple by modern standards, and Tcl overlaps BASIC neatly, making conversion easy.

Unfortunately it's just a short-term stopgap to add some features management suddenly can't live without, that weren't practical to implement in BASIC/DOS. They'll replace the whole stack with a commercial product and support contract when they find something they like.

I still have a circa-1996 486 running Windows 95. It has an EPROM burner card and software that I use to reprogram the ECM in my car.

The cost of upgrading to modern software and hardware is substantial, plus the learning curve for something I only do rarely nowadays.

A friend works for an airline as a flight simulator tech. Their entire software stack, including the compiler and OS, is FAA-certified.

Then their ancient Honeywell(?) mainframes reached end-of-life they scouted for compatible hardware, of which there was none. The cost of certifying new software, plus the time involved, was astronomical. So, after consulting with the FAA, they paid a hardware company to clone the ancient mainframes in modern silicon. The FAA signed off on it, and they had all-new computers - much smaller than the originals - running the old stack.

Me!

I have a client with some business software that runs on DOS. They have a dozen seats. A single Linux server gives serves a dozen VNC sessions with the software running in DOSEMU. Printing is done with the Linux print stack and three Ethernet print servers.

It has been working without a hitch since 2008. Oh, so has the server, which is a VirtualBox VM.

Managers might want solutions, but to get to them you have to go through HR, which wants checkboxes ticked.

That's two entirely different screening processes.

Borland Quattro.

Yep. Boston Dynamics has been dependent on military contracts since their founding in 1992.

The "no more military weapons" statement seems to have been after they were acquired by Hyundai.

Boston Dynamics' business is, basically, "mobility platforms." After all these years the basic development is all done; now they're pivoting to commercial markets.

There's no real difference between a "murderbot" and, say, a police riot-control platform, a fire-fighting platform, a forestry platform, etc.

They might not be explicitly developing weapon packages any more, but there are plenty of other companies who will be happy to take the money to build them onto Boston Dynamics' platforms.

We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas) and it had no commercials.

A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it.

Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...

Sage Accounting is prone to various connectivity gollywobbles between the server and workstations. The first troubleshooting recommendation is to turn off IPv6. About 75% of that time, the problem then goes away.

I don't own anything with a fingerprint scanner. My phone has a camera, but I don't use a phone for internet.

If the AI does spelling and grammar fixups, I'll root for the AI.

When I was in corporate IT, I got way too much internal email that looked like it had been pecked out by an autistic second-grader, with random spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Which wasn't as much of a problem as the chain-of-consciousness blather of jumbled words that often made no sense at all.

Some of those people were Ph.Ds in charge of multimillion-dollar subsidiaries and dozens or hundreds of employees, but they may have well have been trying to communicate by interpretive farting and tap-dancing.

Back in the (early 1960s?) Isaac Asimov wrote a book on how to do arithmetic calculations in your head. He pointed out that someone who developed that skill could solve problems faster in their head than by reaching for a slide rule, and they wouldn't necessarily be limited to slide rule approximations. Engineers, accountants, etc. would be more productive by being able to do calculations without having to reach for a slide rule or pencil and paper.

[pause for 'slide rule' chuckle]

The same applies to "open calculator app and key the figures in," though. I'm not sure that "user interface" was a thing back when he wrote that, but that's what he was talking about.

I'm another who never stopped. I still use matchbox-sized MP3 players, replacing them when they die. Wifi is sparse in my area, and even cellular signals are unreliable (and expensive), so I stayed local-only.

The little players also have discrete "stop" and "volume" buttons or rockers, which means I can pause or adjust volume without having to see the player. Much better than hauling a phone out and spend time navigating menus.

Nobody ever says a word to me, unless I have the earbuds in; then complete strangers will walk up and start talking. Pause the player, remove an earbud, ask them to repeat what they said; they get angry. The usual.

I understand the "everybody does it that way" aspect of the cloud, but the old way of subscribing to a dynamic DNS and hosting locally still works just fine and you have full control of things.

Later, once you have more traffic and/or paying customers, it would be worth looking into cloud hosting. And even then, you probably don't need as much horsepower as they're trying to sell.