[HN Gopher] Reviewing a Dell Linux PC 23 years ago
___________________________________________________________________
Reviewing a Dell Linux PC 23 years ago
Author : lproven
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-09-10 12:30 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org)
| browningstreet wrote:
| I'm struck by how beautiful that page design was.
|
| We don't really daily printed things that look nice anymore.
| Certainly web pages don't look/read well, and as much as I like
| Feedly/Unread, reading an article there isn't better than reading
| a printed magazine article.. then and still.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I'm disappointed with the keming though. "Red H at"
| SoftTalker wrote:
| What am I missing? It's a three-column layout with an image in
| the center. It's OK, I guess. I'm not seeing any beauty. In
| fact, some of the text flow around the image looks quite
| awkward to me. It was probably done in 5 minutes with PageMaker
| or whatever publishing software magazines used at the time.
| least wrote:
| The unfortunate reality of working with responsive layouts and
| unlimited canvas sizes are that it's rare to see anything on
| the web that looks as delightful as a page in a magazine or
| book, where the dimensions/aspect ratio are static. There are
| occasionally some pages that really demonstrate the best of
| what _can be_ but creating these is significantly more
| expensive than designing a nice looking layout for a magazine.
|
| I actually really miss designing webpages without any
| consideration for accessibility or for different sized screens
| because I felt like you could be a _lot_ more creative back
| when you 'd just throw a "Best viewed at 800x600 in Internet
| Explorer" disclaimer on your website.
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| I honestly don't see the dichotomy here. Can't you do both if
| you want? Use a design like the one on Liam on Linux' site
| and make it responsive (where necessary). Actually ... this
| site is already responsive enough imo.
| least wrote:
| > Can't you do both if you want? Use a design like the one
| on Liam on Linux' site and make it responsive (where
| necessary). Actually ... this site is already responsive
| enough imo.
|
| You can't both enforce a very specific aspect ratio and
| dimensions and be responsive with any semblance of
| practicality. The reason the magazine page can look good is
| because the person designing it knows exactly the size of
| all the elements, the aspect ratio and dimensions of the
| page it's being printed to. All of the graphics are placed
| intentionally, and all of the type is set intentionally to
| exactly where they want it to be and how they want it to
| look, with of course the constraint of the content
| dictating what that will be.
|
| On a webpage you're just doing a lot of guessing of what
| the viewport might look like for users. You probably could,
| through media queries, determine if a person's viewport is
| exactly right for your one desired layout and only show it
| if that's the case, but that'd be a waste of resources. You
| could also enforce the layout you want in your css by
| setting things by pixels and then you'll be sure that it
| looks exactly as you intend... except then it isn't
| responsive.
|
| So hypothetically, yes, you could still have it be
| responsive, but there's just no point, is there, if only
| the people that happen to meet your very specific
| requirements ever see it?
|
| That's why good web design is _hard_ and why it 's become,
| in my opinion, kind of boring in terms of layout design.
| You have to account for all those different devices looking
| at it and try to make it look as nice as possible while
| still being useable.
| datalus wrote:
| Truly this is the year of Linux on the desktop!
| juunpp wrote:
| Its popularity always growing by an epsilon.
| [deleted]
| demondemidi wrote:
| Nice to see XFree86 is much easier to setup these days.
| lemper wrote:
| with that much of dough now (inflation adjusted), I just hope
| that common server focused Linux distros are supported out of the
| box. my experience with dell workstation (refurbed one though),
| was pretty ok ish. not that buttery smooth but was ok.
| ghaff wrote:
| PCs used to be pretty costly. The long-time editor in chief of
| PC Magazine coined "Machrone's Law" that the PC you wanted
| always cost $5,000--and that held pretty well into at least the
| late 90s.
|
| Supported Linux on one or two PC models is a pretty
| longstanding sideline of Dell's. They've had some version of
| Ubuntu on a laptop for a long time.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Right, and that was in 90s dollars!
|
| It's pretty astounding what you get for $2k 2023 dollars now,
| which is roughly $1k in 1998 dollars.
|
| Plus that $2k 2023 machine will be good enough for probably 5
| years even for a pretty serious professional. Versus a $3k
| 1998 machine that even for a young hobbyist was basically
| decrepit in under 3 years.
|
| So your modern day computing run rate is like $400 2023
| dollars per year, versus late 90s being easily the equivalent
| of $2k 2023 dollars per year.
| ghaff wrote:
| Once GUIs became the norm, that shiny new PC you
| bought/built was basically not fast enough on Day 1.
| Whereas I still use my 2015 iMac and MacBook and they're
| really not even that bad for photo and video editing. I did
| buy an M1 Pro MacBook for multimedia but I'll be the first
| to admit it was sort of a luxury purchase. (And partly for
| reasons that may not really play out.)
|
| My first dual floppy PC clone (who could afford a hard disk
| or genuine IBM?) in 1982 was somewhere in the low 4 digits
| all-in which was probably close to 10% of my gross salary
| _as an engineer_ at the time.
|
| But, yeah, you can get a very well equipped Mac for about
| $3K these days. (Which is obviously not the economy PC
| option.) Even if you were starting from scratch you'd
| probably have to really work to get it up to $5K with
| external monitor, external hard drives, peripherals,
| printer, etc.
| baz00 wrote:
| Oh wow I bought one of them at the time to run windows 2000.
| Nicely put together machine.
| deepakin wrote:
| Oh man, I remember attempting to install Mandrake Linux on a HP
| machine back in '03......Ended up taking all night and into the
| morning with a buddy and I, and even then some drivers were
| missing and did not work well... Good times though for sure.
| oaiey wrote:
| The articles has some nice statements which did not age well:
|
| A video card suitable for gamers but not for a workstation. We
| have 2-3 Business Hype cycles which rely completely on graphic
| cards.
|
| Or the shocking default setting of DHCP in the TCP/IP setting. As
| if today 90% of network stacks would work without DHCP and IMHO a
| Network Admin would never rely on a front end for managing IP
| addresses.
| ralmidani wrote:
| I don't have experience with GNU/Linux going back that far, but
| even since 2014 (when I got started with Ubuntu), I've seen
| things get much, much better.
|
| These days my personal and professional daily drivers are,
| respectively, a 2021 and a 2022 Framework laptop, both with
| Fedora/GNOME updated regularly. The software is so much more
| usable than any MS OS since Windows 7, and even MacOS of the past
| 2-3 years (many people I talk to have remarked on how MacOS
| quality and usability have been degrading recently).
|
| The only pain points I notice with my Framework are not strictly
| software-related (dislaimer: I don't play much in terms of modern
| games anymore); power management/suspend (an atrocity in my
| experience), and quality of internal peripherals (the mic,
| webcam, and trackpad are almost useless, so I use just use a dock
| and external peripherals - and they work great with minimal
| hassle).
|
| Not to sound like a broken record, but 2024 will probably be the
| year of the GNU/Linux desktop, especially with Framework's AMD
| 16-inch laptop with upgradeable GPU making a huge splash, and MS
| and Apple continuing to alienate developers and power users. I'm
| actually glad they're getting worse because it pushes more people
| toward FOSS - severe but temporary punishment is actually more
| effective and less cruel than life in prison.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| There is something seriously bothering me recently when I look
| back on last 20 years of computing.
|
| > This supports dual Pentium III processors running at up to 1GHz
| and up to four RIMMs; the review machine had two 64MB modules for
| 128MB of dual-channel RDRAM.
|
| I recently dug out from storage an old, from 2002, reasonably
| high spec Thinkpad (sorry don't have exact specs on hand). I was
| obviously running Linux on it at the time as I've been using
| Linux as my primary operating system since 1995! Yes seriously I
| have.
|
| Anyway. I decide to boot it up, knowing it was stored it pretty
| much ideal conditions. It works perfectly, except battery of
| course.
|
| It only has 64MB ram! But everything runs, the web browser. And
| it's fast.
|
| I only spent about 1 hour playing round. But it left me
| distraught. What has happened that our web browsers use 2G of
| memory and are slow! What really is the software progress in last
| 20 years? Obviously the hardware has progressed massively but I
| couldn't help but be concerned with how little improvement was
| immediately obvious, in fact it was so fast and reactive GUI,
| faster than today!
| lizknope wrote:
| My first PC was a Pentium 90 with 16MB RAM in 1994. I bought it
| specifically to run Linux. I've never really used DOS/Windows
| as my main OS on my personal machine.
|
| Everything was fast back then. I had X11, Netscape, ethernet in
| the dorm. In a lot of ways I prefer the simple text heavy web
| pages of the time.
|
| I've been designing integrated circuits including many chips in
| popular smartphones, network switches, and more. We make stuff
| faster but software manages to expand making my 8 core CPU with
| 64GB of RAM feel about the same when web browsing compared to
| back then.
|
| I don't want to go back to those days but in many ways my
| computer with multiple X terminals, XFCE desktop, and Firefox,
| is extremely similar.
| dizhn wrote:
| Even years after that Netscape would crash without any error
| messages and vanish multiple times a day. The past might have
| been good but we take so many things for granted today. Even
| if a browser crashes, it usually keeps all your tabs intact
| when you start it back up.
| ghaff wrote:
| Something disappears into the ether every couple of years
| these days, but losing most of a day's work to a crash or
| some fat-fingered muscle memory back in the day didn't used
| to be an uncommon occurrence at all.
| [deleted]
| baz00 wrote:
| I'll sound like a miserable old bastard here, which I am, but
| I'm all for bringing back Gopher and banning any non native
| applications on a platform. Electron I'm looking at you.
|
| All the native apps on my Mac desktop, an ass end M1 mac mini,
| are really really damn fast.
|
| The moment I put windows, any managed apps or anything web
| based or wrapped web applications near any computer, a world of
| pain opens. It's mostly energy sucking buggy crap which serves
| the developers more than the customers. That's a cancer in the
| industry which is only going to get worse when we ship towers
| of excrement on top of WASM.
| pjerem wrote:
| I have pipe dreams of using Serenity OS as my daily driver.
|
| Also, I advise you to try Haiku OS Live CD. It's refreshing.
| baz00 wrote:
| I was a BeOS user for a few months back in the day. That
| would be perfect but no I need to use things which are on
| macOS.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Less resource pressure. No need to fit in 64 MB when you have
| 2,000 MB.
|
| Less experienced programmers (only know the latest thing;
| promoted to mediocre project leads... while the Old Guard
| doesn't pass on their knowledge before retiring)
|
| Poorly documented code resulting layered workarounds (MS code
| from the 80's and 90's was hot garbage in terms of comments;
| source: I worked on Win95 diplay drivers and didn't comment any
| of my 16-bit VXDs. See previous gripe about O.G. being bad at
| documentation)
|
| Bloated libraries (ironically, reluctance to jettison old code
| that is not well understood, so patch around it and keep
| dragging the baggage to the next release.)
|
| Insufficient test suites causing too much bloat (see previous
| comment).
|
| More complex APIs (spywhere and integrations everywhere).
|
| I haven't walked the Windows source tree in 30 years, it would
| be fascinating to see a breakdown of the kernal linker map
| summaries.
| stefan_ wrote:
| One thing that people overlook is just stuff like screen sizes.
| Back then your laptop was 640x480. Now it's 3840x2160, 26 times
| as many pixels to push. Just a single 4k framebuffer will take
| up 32 MiB, you are gonna need at least two (and your system
| might even want to use 3) so you are looking at 96 MiB of
| memory right there. And this leaks into everything - just
| keeping a single display fed at 60 Hz takes up 2 GByte/s of
| memory bandwidth, more than half of what your dual-channel
| RDRAM setup could even deliver.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| While there is some truth to your point, you have to remember
| that resolutions where already pretty high in the 90s (CRTs,
| not LCDs); I remember using 1024x768 as the standard, and it
| only required something like a 2MB VGA card. Part of the
| reason we had these huge framebuffers and still work with a
| minuscule amount of RAM is cultural. Programs (GUIs, games)
| would just NOT store a bazillion copies of the framebuffer,
| but rather only one or two (and mostly in the video card
| itself), and would prefer to scroll or redraw rather then to
| save/restore contents of the framebuffer whenever possible.
|
| One pretty obvious example happened in the 2000s where the
| major 3 operating systems switched to desktop compositing
| almost simultaneously. You suddenly jump from requiring
| memory for just one framebuffer to requiring memory for one
| framebuffer + a copy of all the windows you have created.
| saltcured wrote:
| I've posted about this before, but people forget that we
| used to worry about bit depth for the framebuffer and
| available VRAM. And back then, such a low-RAM card was only
| doing 2D acceleration at most, with a little offscreen
| buffer for fonts and sprites that would be blitted into the
| active framebuffer or composed at the DAC by the card
| itself (like the cursor).
|
| Just for your example, 1024x768 would require a minimum of
| 3 MB just for a single buffer of pixels if stored with
| today's typical 4-byte RGBA and updated in immediate mode.
| A double-buffering technique would take twice as much. Most
| often, we were using either 8-bit pseudo-color mode or
| maybe 2-byte 15-bit true color with only 5 bits per RGB
| component and no transparency. A 2MB card might support
| 1024x768 in 15-bit mode or 1280x1024 in 8-bit mode.
|
| I distinctly remember on my first serious Linux machine
| when I downloaded a single large JPEG image from an
| academic site and displayed it with the "xv" command which
| was the go-to image viewer at the time. It required virtual
| memory swapping because the image buffer to store the
| decoded image would be larger than my entire 20MB of system
| RAM. This was an unusual image, interesting to me mostly
| for this fact. As I recall, it was a high resolution scan
| of an ancient manuscript.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I find this line of thinking very interesting. From above:
|
| > And this leaks into everything - just keeping a single
| display fed at 60 Hz takes up 2 GByte/s of memory
| bandwidth, more than half of what your dual-channel RDRAM
| setup could even deliver.
|
| Does anyone know how practical are any countermeasures, for
| instance is tinycorelinux tinyx working for anyone?
|
| I'm particularly interested in all the used Chromebooks
| floating around and what are some ways to trick them out
| with customized Linux.
| afavour wrote:
| It's just economics, really. 1GB of RAM was unfathomably
| expensive back then so if you wrote software requiring it you'd
| be dead in the water.
|
| These days RAM is cheaper than development time so instead of
| writing tightly memory controlled programs in C we write in
| e.g. garbage collected JavaScript. It's easier to learn and
| quicker to develop with. Part of me is broken hearted that the
| "art" of efficient programming is lost but it was an inevitable
| consequence of software becoming so central to our lives.
|
| (and hey, that same discipline does still exist today if you
| want to dabble in it, in embedded spaces etc)
| jeffbee wrote:
| > 1GB of RAM was unfathomably expensive back then
|
| Well ... about $6k which wasn't astonishing for workstation
| budgets. These were machines that many people used to run
| software that cost $100k/year.
|
| A credit to the incredible expandability of this era of
| Precision Workstation machines is you could have expanded the
| model 620 to 3GiB of main memory, which isn't bad at all.
| With 2x Pentium III Xeon CPUs and 3GiB you could credibly use
| that machine today. All that RAM only costs $75 today.
| bombcar wrote:
| I also feel "back then" it was quite easy for a enthusiast
| machine to be quite well past "top of the line" whereas now
| we've been in the 2-4GB "standard" for so long that most
| people have it - it's decently hard to have something
| surprisingly faster than "top of the line".
|
| E.g, I remember "recommended specs" for computer games that
| would ask for 64 MB of RAM; I had 128 MB.
| toast0 wrote:
| Something like 16GB is or exceeds recommended specs for
| most desktop things... But some people are running 64 or
| 128GB in their desktops. So, I think overkill computers are
| still out there. It is pretty hard to get ahead of CPU
| specs now though: used to be you could get server chips
| (and a server/workstation board) and have something that
| was clearly better in every area other than price. Now,
| desktop sockets get new architectures before servers, and
| server chips have more cores, but usually lower clocks and
| not everything will scale to more cores in a way that makes
| that better.
| jcelerier wrote:
| I've installed a clean windows 11 on some okay hardware a few
| days ago (i7 10750H, 32G ram, two 5GB/s NVMe SSD, GTX 2060) and
| everything is so astonishingly slow, at first I was mad but now
| I'm just utterly amazed.
|
| I'll sometime wait three seconds for the explorer to open.
| Launching any non-trivial app takes on average 10 seconds.
| Sometimes copying stuff from a disk to another will show the
| incredible speed of 2 MB/s on stuff that should be literally
| instant. I have to _wait for git_ which literally never happens
| to me on Linux ; just opening an MSYS shell lags (it 's just a
| console and bash ffs!). MsMpEng.exe uses 15 - 20% CPU
| constantly even when turning every A/V shit off. And let's not
| even talk about usability - I got stuck for some reason with
| keyboard layouts that I didn't install, and apparently in Win
| 11, by default, not less than THREE SHORTCUTS will switch
| between layouts - ctrl+shift, alt+shift and win+space, which
| made coding absolutely insane until I could find a way to the
| "advanced keyboard settings" where the "alt+shift" shortcut
| could be turned off (which apparently also automagically turned
| off the "ctrl+shift" one).
|
| And I could find hundred of messages on boards complaining
| about this, with "Microsoft MVPs" answering with the most
| generic and useless advice like "chkdsk", "do a check from your
| bios", "update your drivers".
|
| Linux on the same hardware absolutely flies even when ran from
| a USB 2 stick, with as much eye candy with e.g. KDE Plasma.
|
| And let's not talk about C++ compile times which are insane in
| Windows with the exact same compiler & toolchain (clang 16,
| libc++, lld...) compared to Linux, even when taking care of
| installing it on a separate drive, excluding the whole drive
| from virus scan...
| distract8901 wrote:
| My work laptop runs windows. 16 core 3.4GHz I7, pretty
| respectable. It should be, it's brand new.
|
| C++ compilation takes more than twice as long as my Linux
| server from 2010. It's got two 16 core Xeon 2600-something
| processors at 2.6GHz. GCC doesn't even fully load the
| processors, it's something like 70% average and still runs
| twice as fast.
|
| Fortunately, the exact details of my job have changed and I
| can switch to Linux soon. If my work machine still can't
| compete with my server, I can just slap distcc on it and use
| my server as a remote compile node. Might do it anyway, the
| compile is 'only' five minutes on my server, if I can combine
| these machines it'll likely halve again.
| baz00 wrote:
| That'll probably be NTFS shafting you. It's terrible at
| handling small files.
|
| Trick I found was to fire up a Linux VM and do your
| compilation in there.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Also Windows file handling in general. It's incredibly
| flexible, allowing an arbitrary number of drivers to log
| or modify every disk access. That's great if you want
| real-time antivirus software, transparent file encryption
| (without encrypting the full partition), data-loss
| prevention software, advanced file syncing etc. But it
| also makes workflows that access lots of small files very
| slow.
|
| Instead of a VM you can also use WSL2, assuming you put
| the files in the linux file system instead of accessing
| the host file system. (Yes, technically that's also just
| a fancy VM running in Hyper-V; but it's a more integrated
| experience than e.g. VMWare)
| StillBored wrote:
| I don't run windows seriously anymore, but on small tablet
| level devices i've used recently, disabling everything in
| the "security" menus will significantly speed up windows.
|
| In particular disabling MS defender (or whatever its called
| this week), will provide a massive increase in disk speed
| as its not longer scanning every single thing your reading
| off the disk.
|
| This isn't so much NFTS but all the filters/etc that
| windows now comes with. In the past you would only get this
| behavior if you installed norton/mcafee and let it turn IO
| problems into CPU bound ones, but now its mostly
| unavoidable on windows. While your linux machine probably
| doesn't even have an always on virus scanner available.
| mftrhu wrote:
| > What has happened that our web browsers use 2G of memory and
| are slow!
|
| They are much more complex - ridiculously so - both because of
| the constant evolution of web standards _and_ because of
| everything they need to do to keep what they execute in its own
| sandbox.
|
| It doesn't help that the actual content being served just keeps
| on bloating. Think back to the average web page in the early
| 2000s: it was probably still browsed over a 56k modem, CSS was
| _starting_ to get support, and if it might have had a few
| inline images it was still mostly text embedded in plain HTML.
| Web apps were CGI, JS was used sparingly, and people were
| _still_ using frames.
|
| Those pages were positively _anemic_ when compared to what we
| sling around nowadays. 1 MB used to be _a lot of data_ , and it
| just isn't the case anymore. You have layers of abstractions
| piled up on each other, isolated from the rest of the system as
| much as possible, slurping in, parsing and rendering multi-
| megabyte compressed, encrypted blobs.
|
| But yes - it is a shame. We are doing _so much more_ to achieve
| pretty much the same thing, and I keep on asking myself if we
| really need to.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I can also add mandatory TLS to this list. Back in the day
| you could receive an entire webpage response in the first TCP
| packet with data. TLS requires more turn-arounds, especially
| if webpage uses multiple different domains, and network
| latency is not going anywhere, it's physics. I had 200 ms
| latency in 2000, I have 200 ms latency in 2020, I'll have 200
| ms latency in 2050, that's just thousands of kilometers to
| travel.
| toast0 wrote:
| Latencies have gotten better, although not tremendously so.
|
| Depending on your last mile tech in 2000 and what you have
| now, you might have gone fron dialup with first hop round
| trips of 50-100ms, to something in the neighborhood of
| 5-25ms with fiber, dsl or cable. Or maybe you were already
| on dsl or cable and things are about the same.
|
| Most of a 200ms round trip is on a long distance route, and
| fiber routes have improved, as had routing equipment in the
| data path. If you're outside the US and Europe, there's
| been a lot more local interconnections too, so routes that
| used to bounce through US/EU in 2000 don't in 2023.
|
| Saving a few ms here and there adds up, but 160 ms instead
| of 200 ms doesn't feel that much different.
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| There are a few things 1) the tradition of tight code writing
| has been abandoned in favor of fast deployment, to the point of
| people expecting day 0 bugs in software. 2) webpages themselves
| are bigger. 3) latency from webloading trained people to expect
| it locally, and a lot of apps are just wrappers around what are
| effectively webapps.
| [deleted]
| tomjen3 wrote:
| A couple things: your fonts render better, your text is in
| Unicode (may not be a big deal for Americans, just trust me
| that I care that I can write reliably in my own language), your
| kernel has to support many more abstractions.
|
| But the real issue is that the browser does a lot more than it
| used to and languages with JIT compilers and automatic memory
| management are just going to have a much higher overhead than
| C++. This is doubly true when the languages are non-typed and
| ultra-dynamic like JS.
|
| For a while I browsed the internet without JS enabled and sites
| that didn't break loaded without any visible delay.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Do you also remember that Netscape Navigator was hot garbage?
| It was so bad that people would brag about how stable their OS
| was by how well it handled Netscape crashes.
|
| The first computer I felt was _fast_ and responsive is my
| current MacBook Air M2.
|
| But in all honesty, I haven't worked with my own personal
| computer in years. I mostly worked on corporate Windows
| computers and my last Mac was a latest generation MacBook Pro
| 16 inch with corporate installed malware.
| Aleklart wrote:
| Browsers are doing insane work very efficient: rendering pages
| of true type fonts and ultra res images while executing
| hundreds of js per second in VM and transforming page layout
| according to dynamically changing CSS rules. For all 10-100
| sites opened at once.
|
| It is Linux that now slow and bloated, not speaking of layers
| of GTK lard that can not render a window with simple controls
| without consuming hundreds of megabytes.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, part of the answer with respect to web browsers
| specifically is that we keep 100 tabs open and websites are
| often very bloated with respect to advertising-related
| components in particular. Security-related features probably
| also add some degree of overhead.
|
| If I just want to run something simple locally on a stripped
| down version of Linux it would probably be pretty fast and
| resource-efficient.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| > What really is the software progress in last 20 years?
|
| It has become significantly cheaper and easier to build
| software.
|
| That has come at the cost of an enormous complexity paid by
| hardware and reliability.
| ghaff wrote:
| I question the reliability part. Certainly there is more
| complexity (in some respects), more dependencies, etc. But
| I'd probably argue that most of the software I use today is
| more reliable than equivalent software (if it existed) that I
| used a couple decades ago.
| ericzawo wrote:
| I can't believe companies were totally cool with shipping very
| expensive family computers in 2000 with "no sound support." Lol.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "Precision Workstation" was not marketed to home users. It was
| a real workstation. The Dell home systems were Inspiron and
| Dimension.
| [deleted]
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| I remember the intense frustration of my first computer of
| having to select which sound card you had for certain games. Oh
| sure, your computer did come with sound, but not for this game
| as your card wasn't on the list of supported cards.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Does anyone notice how different his writing is than what we see
| now? I miss when people wrote like this. Everything now is so
| direct and informal. Internet writing now is like a text message,
| as abrupt and emotion laden as possible, like it knows the
| readers have an attention span of less than ten seconds. We've
| lost something.
| pjerem wrote:
| No, good prose still exists but you have to pay for it.
|
| You are just overwhelmed by free low quality content.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Unmentioned in the review is the disaster of trying to upgrade
| your RAM in these. I had the model 620, on which the 8 RIMM slots
| were on two expansion cards. RIMMs were invented by a person who
| appreciated the user-friendly nature of SCSI. You had to
| correctly deduce if and where to install "Continuity RIMMs" which
| shorted the bus to termination networks on the motherboard. And
| of course you were responsible for not losing these if you ever
| removed them from the system.
| thsksbd wrote:
| The old keyboards of 90s and early 2000 laptops were ideal.
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