"garigue" wrote


Yepper the bum society rears its head again ...... over 400k words in
the
English language, or so I 've heard, and the universal sentence
enhancer is
always to be found .... pity ...


Tom,

I think it's just become fashionable to be a self-righteous bitcher
against "Them"!

Here in reality computing has advanced light years in just a couple of
decades. My first computer (a Heath H89) had an amazing 48KB of RAM
which I upgraded all the way to 64K for the princely sum of $129, dual
boot (HDOS or CPM), a single floppy drive, no hard drive, no CD drive,
no DVC drive and an upgrade to a 12" amber screen (none of those
primitive green CRT's for me!). Processor (Zilog Z80) speed was
measured in KHz. Total price for the whole thing was just under $2,500.
Software was scarce and expensive, and web crawlers, usenet, and email
were Buck Rogers stuff. Not available to me at home, but
forward-looking companies were willing to pay $2,500/mo for 9.6KHz DDS
connectivity!

My current 'hobby' computer came with a measly 512MB of RAM which I
upgraded to 1GB for $92. It still has only one floppy drive, but 120GB
hard drive, a DVD (r/w) drive, a CD (r/w) drive. Processor speed is
2.5GHz, I have fulltime broadband connectivity to the world-wide-web for
under $50/mo, and more choices of reasonably priced software than I can
count. All thanks to those assholes at Microsoft and Intel. Ain't it
just awful?

73, de Hans, K0HB