YATYRD (was: PalmOS no more? :(

[Zane H. Healy]

At 11:13 AM -0400 9/29/05, Roger Merchberger wrote:
>Rumor has it that Tom Jennings may have mentioned these words:
>>Eh. Dump the 10 year rule and cut off at 1994.
>
>Sure, but then my Amiga wouldn't be classic anymore. It was built in 
>'98. Oh, wait, then it still isn't, even *with* the 10-year rule. :-/

It's an Amiga 4000, and as such I suspect it is within the 10-year 
rule, though it does make for an interesting question. 
Realistically, I don't think anyone will object to you talking about 
it here.  Besides, even though it was "built" in '98, when were the 
boards manufactured?  I thought they were using NOS boards that 
Commodore made.

>But what about the 90's?
>
>Seriously - let's look at this:
>
>When I joined the list, CoCo 3s weren't technically ontopic yet, as 
>they'd been sold until '92. (Disco'ed in '91, I think I saw one 
>(still in a RS store) in '93.
>
>When I joined the list, Macintoshes *still couldn't* multitask; 
>8-bitters could do that since '81-82 (whenever OS-9 was released). 
>Yet lots of people are still waxing poetic about 68K Macs - I found 
>them udderly[1] pitiful... much less useful for the power available 
>than my NT4 workstation. Granted, I wasn't doing photo editing or 
>typesetting; just the basics.

When you joined the list, Mac's *COULD* multitask (I can't remember 
if it would have been System 7.5, 7.6, or 8.0), they simply did 
cooperative multitasking, rather than preemptive multitasking. 
Furthermore, a 68k Mac was outdated when you joined this list, and 
Apple was on either it's 2nd or 3rd model of PowerMac.

>[[ dons flameproof knickers... I'm not saying that Macs sucked, but 
>I was rather disheartened when I finally had access to a Mac, that 
>every other sentence I said started with "whaddya mean it can't..." 
>What it could do, it did very well; but as a general-purpose 
>computing platform, the OS was rather lacking. ]]

Actually that "lacking" was part of it's beauty, I was always more 
productive on a classic Mac because of that "lacking".  As you might 
guess, I'm typing this on a Mac (a dual 2Ghz G5 running Mac OS X 
10.3.9 to be exact), and I for one long for the days of Mac OS 9. 
Unfortunately all the new software requires Mac OS X, the only other 
advantage for me is that it has Unix underneath, so I no longer need 
both a Mac and a Unix box running at the same time.

			Zane


-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |