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MarkTJohnson wrote: Because one did it and got away with it so others are following suit. ...or the industry was grossly over employed and stock holders need to make a profit eventually.
MarkTJohnson wrote: Leader, lemming they both start with L. So do "losses" and "line of credit".
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Because whe you talk about unions or worker rights a lot of people from a great country see red and start blasting.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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This is a long, but great article you will especially enjoy if you were coding back in 1993.
That was when my career was just starting.
I was reading Programming Windows 3.1 (Charles Petzold) and completely confused.
I also remember someone gave me a copy of VB 3.0 on three 3.5" disks.
CODE: 30 Years Ago[^]
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I guess that lots of us who were coding 30 years ago was doing it on Sun workstations running Solaris, on vaxen running VMS, some on IBM mainframes, some on various minis/superminis running proprietary OSes, and so on. We didn't really take PCs seriously, not as independent, complete solutions. They could do a good job as front ends to a larger machine, but for serious work, you had something more powerful.
1993 was near the turning point, though. Some had started taking PCs seriously, (maybe most) others had not. Not yet. I would say that Windows hadn't really grown up until W95. I could say that it wasn't fully mature until NTFS - sure, it was introduced in 1993, but didn't become widespread for another few years.
I was teaching at a tech. college 1990-95. We were running programming exercises on a proprietary mini, on X.11 workstations to an Alpha - and some PCs, e.g. for programming a simplified Kermit between two PCs.
To illustrate the level of PC 'seriousness': I took a class to a visit to Statoil, the oil company of the Norwegian state. The guide showed us the huge VAX machine handling all technical data from the oil fields. After processing, the data would be stored in an equally huge IBM mainframe database machine. Communication between IBM and others was always a RPITB. The IBMs could run Kermit, though. So we were shown a little IBM PC with two COM ports, one for running Kermit to the IBM, one for running another Kermit to the VAX. The PC acted as a relay moving data from the one Kermit interface to the other. (I don't remember why they couldn't have a direct Kermit link; my guess is that the PC did ASCII / EBCDIC conversion as part of the forwarding.)
My students shook their heads in disbelief. You can't transfer huge amounts of technical information, representing values of billions, using Kermit on a PC, over COM ports? Seriously?? The guide looked slightly ashamed when explaining, 'Well, this is what we could make work, and it works!'
I don't have the exact date for this; I would guess around 1994.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
The article makes your same point in a different way...
It mentions Novell Netware and Win 3.11 for workgroups (networking just arising in the PC world).
Then, of course, NT had networking built in.
Connecting PCs for collaborative work in a business environment is really a necessity and since PCs couldn't do this before is probably why they weren't "taken seriously".
Once networking happened (and was simplified) it really made PCs take off.
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The agonies and ecstasies of learning computers back then... My learning, in 1989.
We had a PC XT 286 in our University lab, and had Matlab installed. A senior told me that the PATH variable had been set, but I couldn't understand its implication. Therefore, I used to copy my program.m file from C:\User1 to the A:\ drive, and then copy this file from A:\ drive to the C:\Matlab folder (on the same PC XT), in order to run it. Then he came and saw, and had a big laugh. Only then did I understand the significance of PATH environment variable. An on-the-job kind of lesson.
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That's a great story. I was working in tech support in 1991-92 and having to set up people's autoexec.bat and config.sys files to support the company software. They were really so cryptic.
And sometimes I had to talk a person through editing their config.sys files using edlin (do you remember that one?).
Also, at times I'd have to tell the user where a key was. "The 's' key is on the left side in the middle.
It was a form of torture that I endured to get my foot inside the IT industry.
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raddevus wrote: edlin
Not exactly edlin, but vi.
When i learnt vi editor on Unix, there have been instances where I've lost/overwritten source files. Only to rewrite them again. Since they were only college project files, it was okay.
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Windows 11's built-in archive support is getting new features to give users more flexibility and customization when working with ZIP, 7zip, and TAR archives without relying on third-party apps. How small do you want it?
Sadly, still no password support
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Windows 11 can be reduced to a command-line interface, known as Minwin, resembling the graphically simple Command Prompt. I think they call that DOS
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Until autoupdate brings back the full experience. Right in the middle of a batch command...
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Isn't that sort of like reducing a C compiler to handle inline assembler only?
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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DOS never required 100MB of memory. Or disk space.
Furthermore, DOS could run any application built for it, including early versions of Windows. This abortion can't even run all Console applications, because some use DLLs that have been removed from the system.
Meh!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I have spent a good chunk of the past 6 months trying to bring Rust to .NET. In case you like your .NET a little rusty
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The JAXA space agency did say it managed to collect some data before it shut down the lander. They forgot to include a "This side up" label
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Perhaps they should have launched it from Australia.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Computer science teachers, software experts share their advice on ML assistants This news brought to you by the person that gets to fix your AI-generated code
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Google has just unveiled a game-changing AI upgrade for Android. But it has a darker side. As opposed to just Google reading them all
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great. I see no negative outcomes from this.
My iPhone is 4+ years old. About the only useful thing on it is the camera. But google or Apple is bad enough cyphering what I am doing. Going to update to a flip phone this month.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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The commission wants to understand the tangled web of investments between cloud providers and AI startups. They'd rather those companies invest in the FTC
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Ingenuity has spent more than two hours flying above Mars since April 2021. "Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."
OK, not heart but propellor. Still, it must be dusty in here.
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Upvoted for the Hamlet quote.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Errors with spreadsheets are not only frustrating but can have serious consequences. Excel deemed dangerous
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DError is in DLookup!
(DLookup/VLookup - big deal!)
modified 29-Jan-24 2:42am.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Excel deemed dangerous considered harmful
FTFY
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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