Quote from: Last Hussar on 28 May 2016, 05:06:07 PM
But... but... but I like it!

Got to agree (a bit!) - loathed Windows 8; 8.1 was still crap! 10's not perfect, but it's at least a reasonably tolerable approximation of the proper Windows of yester yore (that I vaguely understood how to do stuff on)...

Cheers!

Meirion

I've been happy with 10, except for the Start menu issues (now fixed, thus far...) and the Calculator going kaput. Which this thread just reminded me to check, and it now works again! Hurrah for updates!

I've got a Windows 7 laptop which I use for most things and have been plagued by MS urging me to upgrade for free, however given the age and power of the hardware I'm not going to touch it.

I've recently bought a new laptop with W10 pre-installed, mostly for photo work as my old one won't run the latest version of Lightroom.  It works fine, although Bing is a pain and I'm slowly getting used to it but I'm fortunate that I'm not dependent on W10 upgrade on a dodgy hardware platform with a lot of old programs.

One solution I've heard advocated is to get a W10 machine then run W7, XP or whatever inside it as a virtual machine however I would only think this is viable if the W10 machine was new, reasonably high spec and the W10 was a factory install.

I'm pretty certain that my next major upgrade will be to a big iMac, I always went for PCs because I've worked with them for years, but my job's changed and I haven't done PC support/development for years and I no longer need to run the same versions of MS Office at home as I have at work.  W10 is as alien to me as Mac OS, however I won't be moving on for 3 or 4 years when my current W10 laptop dies or won't run the next version of the MS software.

Bring back 3.1 and DOS CLI 

No - we need paper tape and punch cards.

IanS

Punch cards made excellent paper darts. In an experiment in my first job, we clocked one at over 100mph when fired from a specially created catapult.  We were waiting for a server upgrde to complete, so had lots of time to waste.


Part of my job is training people in Data Protection. A fun part (yes it is) of this is looking at how computers were in 1998 (when the act came out) then rolling forward to now. Many changes! 

Punch cards - the ultimate shopping list notepad

Punched tape - first computer security password system I ever came across.

Tutor says,"I can't tell you the password but here's a piece of punched tape with it on. Just run it through the tape reader to access Palo Alto. Give it back at the end of the session."

First thing we four smartarse students do is run it through the reader with the print option selected. Several copies later we have access to do revision at will.

Couple of weeks later tutor is embarrassed to find he's forgotten to bring the security tape and four hands go up waving replacements. Tutor is unsure whether to be relieved class can go on as planned annoyed that we'd circumvented the "security system."

I use windows 10 at work. On a sufficiently gutsy machine it's pretty good.

I quite like it, tbh.

Something I've seen a couple of do post-free update window closing, is to reset their computers clock so it's on a date before 27-07-16 and then it'll do the update!

I have seriously considered using Linus, but it does cause some problems with application compatability

I worked for Access (the credit card company) and go back as far as 1972 for computer mainframes, IBM 360 and 370 series to be exact. Also the peripherals were 64 x IBM 3330 disk drives, 16 x 3420 tape drives plus punch card readers and telex machines. One of our trainee tests was to get them to put back all the cutouts from a punch card by colour and alphanumeric character. The cutouts made fantastic confetti -the bl**dy stuff got everywhere!

I once worked on an IBM 512k machine running OS in 3 partitions.

Nowadays, I am happy just to get a result by turning the damn thing on. Plus I am so much more tolerant on speeds than others after my work history with the damn things.

MickS

My first work PC had twin floppy drives, a 4.77MHz processor and 512k of RAM.  It worked.

I first programmed with punch cards.

I first programmed with coding forms that were mailed to the University where the punch card operators punched them, ran the job and then mailed the results back

Three runs a fortnight if you were quick with the updated coding forms

I've got 10 on this laptop. It seems OK apart from the boot time, which can be anything from less than a minute to 5 minutes or more. Sometimes it doesn't boot and I'm reduced to holding down the power button to force it off, then waiting a few seconds to press the button to start again.

There doesn't seem to be any reason for the varying boot times that I can see.

Bill Gates - hanging is too good for some people?

Quote from: paulr on 20 August 2016, 04:32:40 AM
I first programmed with coding forms that were mailed to the University where the punch card operators punched them, ran the job and then mailed the results back

Three runs a fortnight if you were quick with the updated coding forms

My first encounter with programming was the same. I was in final year of school, final exams were over but if you wanted to stay to the bitter end of the school year you could do a short computing course.

The coding sheets went to our council computing centre and we were sometimes a little .... frivolous in our headers and REM statements. Nothing rude, you understand, just things like."Gods it must be boring having to input these sheets knowing us numpties will have screwed up the coding"

About a decade later I wound up dealing with the same computing centre and a couple of the operators remembered my name from the coding sheets because of the comments. They were grateful for the break from the tedium of the day job rather than pissed off by the nonsense, fortunately.

ALGOL

COBOL

FORTRAN.

Real Men (tm) programme in machine code, masochists programme in vi