[gui-talk] Computer museum?

[Doug Lee]

Mike is seriously in danger of getting me to dust off memories of 6502
Assembly here... and tricks to let one modify the running Apple II+/E
OS, doing things like reducing how long it took a floppy drive to
respond to commands, changing the frequency of the system bell, and of
course, crashing a II/+ hard enough that the Reset button wouldn't
work anymore.  But I'm not sure what to call my favorite system.  I
was fond of Telix under DOS for a terminal program, and Artic Business
Vision for a screen reader in that environment; and I used that setup
through Windows 98, and I used Windows 98 for some things way past its
time, as several of my coworkers would attest. :)

On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 07:37:59PM -0700, Mike Freeman wrote:
I'm dating myself but my favorite microcomputer operating system was
Cp/M. One could get in there, change the command processor and/or
change/modify the BIOs and have a rollicking good time doing so. One
could generate some horrendous crashs but it was great fun to speed up
systems by half or more and systems with 64K max separated the
efficient programmers from the less-so. I had a grand old time in 8080
and Z80 laassembly languages (several different flavors) and was
perfectly happy with such systems -- I had a HP-125 and Telcon Zorba
for years.

My favorite program of that era was a terminal program called QTERM
written by a guy named David Goodenough. I adapted it for several
different flavors of CP/M systems. I also did the last update of
Kermit for CP/M systems.

For larger machines, I *still* like Vax/VMS. Name me a Windows system
that's been up continuously for well over a year! I can name a Vax/VMS
workstation that's done exactly that! (grin)

Mike

----- Original Message ----- From: "chris hallsworth"
<christopherh40 at googlemail.com>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:04 PM
Subject: [gui-talk] Computer museum?


>Hello all!
>what was your favourite operating system in the history of
>computing? Also what about software? My favourite operating system
>in the history of computing is probably Windows 95 and I was using
>JAWS as my screen reader. My favourite software was a product by
>PowerQuest called Second Chance. (I wonder if anyone remembers
>having that preinstalled on their old machines?) I certainly did and
>it was brilliant! The program is basically System Restore but for
>data as well as system. What Second Chance did was created
>"checkpoints" at regular intervals. You can then restore individual
>files and folders, or even an entire system, to that particular
>checkpoint. Checkpoint 1 was always the "initial" checkpoint either
>after Second Chance was first installed or you have enabled a drive
>to be monitored after it being disabled. One problem Second Chance
>did do was corrupt the JAWS authorization keys that were used way
>back then. You know, the ones that consisted of a special floppy
>disk? This is because, as I soon found out, a hidden/system file
>jfw.cps was backed up by Second Chance each time JAWS modified it.
>So of course when you restored an entire system to an earlier
>checkpoint you lost authorization in the process. But apart from
>that it was brilliant! How I wish they'd brought it back to make it
>work for Windows 7!
>
>-- 
>Sent using Thunderbird
>
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-- 
Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                http://www.dlee.org
SSB BART Group           doug.lee at ssbbartgroup.com   http://www.ssbbartgroup.com
"I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so."
- Josh Billings, 1818-1885 (in "Solemn Thoughts")