Ancient history, but worked at a financial firm which ran Windows for Workgroups with the DLC protocol (so it wasn't eating the 640KB) over token ring, and some quite expensive do-it-all terminal software. Some of the old heads still had a 3270 in their office.
imo, the 'grandparent' type user should really be on an ipad or chromebook etc. (unless they have some specific software needs). Too easy to get unwanted stuff running on windows and it needs admin.
Windows has made improvements in that area in the last decade, but I don't disagree much. It could be the bias of having dealt with IT related issues for long enough, but I do think the "average" user might be regressing closer to that grandparent level as far as (needing, if not wanting to admit) that child-proofing the OS is needed. Chromebook and tablet PC stuff will probably continue to draw more entry level users in. As that marketshare grows we will have to wait and see how malicious programming evolves with it...
Same general guesswork, but everyone on here can make reasonably educated guesses at what the AI evolution process will do to the tech landscape. Nobody knows enough yet to have anything in cement, but it's out there, and the small changes of the last few years make it seem that we are going to regress rather than improve the level of technical knowlege needed to be "average" when working on a computer.
I got an 80y/o a System76, for basic tasks. Knowledge transfer from Windows was relatively quick, a week at most (she was willing, which is not always the case). Maybe we'll see Linux support call scamming, but that's not the case right now - that advantage of Linux for old people cannot be understated.
You are the sysadmin for that machine. Just wait until an update borks or something. Maybe you are a hobbyist who likes fixing computers for free, so fine.
I have done zero technical support for my parent's ipads for like 15 years now. They even got it working with a printer without me. The biggest issue has been bogus emails from "Microsoft Tech Support" and "Norton Antivirus", so the Windows ecosystem still seems grim that way.
Really? I'm pretty sure all the GreetingCardPro-type stuff is available on iPads, and its a better device for banking/investment stuff (because GreetingCardPro can't fuck with it). I was thinking more like QuickBooks or a custom business app.
When they process these emails, it's fairly common to import everything into a MS Outlook PST file (using whatever buggy tool). That's probably why these look like Outlook printouts even though its Yahoo mail or etc.
Total nostalgia talk. Those machines were just glacially slow at launching apps and really everything, like spell check, go get a coffee. I could immediately tell the difference between a 25Mhz Mac IIci and a 25Mhz Mac IIci with a 32KB cache card. That's how slow they were.
Some of us do actually use such machines every now and then.
The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.
For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automatic updated cells, something like Superplan would also be enough.
> their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.
So in other words, their computer needs have changed significantly.
You can't do most modern web-related stuff on a machine from the 90s. Assuming you could get a modern browser (with a modern TLS stack, which is mandatory today) compiled on a machine from the 90s, it would be unusably slow.
Amigans are already using AmiSSL and AmiGemini (and some web browsers) perfectly fine in m68k CPU's recreated with FPGA's.
You can do modern TLS stuff with a machine from the 90's if you cut own the damn JavaScript and run services from https://farside.link or gemini://gemi.dev proxying the web to Gemini.
Not everyone is all the time on the Internet, for some folks their computer needs have stayed the much pretty much the same.
If they want to travel they go to an agency, they still go to the local bank branch to do their stuff, news only what comes up on radio and TV, music is what is on radio, CDs and vinyl, and yet manage to have a good life.
Yeah, I just posted that a lot of that software was amazing and pretty 'feature-complete', all while running on a very limited old personal conmputers.
Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the Mac.
The Amiga had huge success outside of "teenage gamers", even if in niche markets. Amigas were extremely important in TV and video production throughout the 1990s. I remember a local Amiga repair shop in South Florida that stayed in business until about 2007, mainly by servicing Amigas still in service in the local broadcast industry -- all of the local cable providers in particular had loads of them, since they were used for the old Prevue Guide listings, along with lots of other stuff.
Goes both ways, Mac was hardly something to write home about outside US, and they did not follow Commodore footsteps into bankruptcy out of sheer luck.
The Mac didn't exist in Europe except for expensive A/V production machines and the printing world (books, artists, movie posters, covers and the like).
If you were from Humanities and worked for a newspaper design layout you would use a Mac at work. That's it.
I worked on Macs from the start of my career in 1988. They were the standard computer for state schools in education here in the Isle of Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Isle of Man's national travel company ran on a Mac database, Omnis, and later moved to Windows to keep using Omnis.
I supported dozens of Mac-using clients in London through the 1990s and they were the standard platform in some businesses. Windows NT Server had good MacOS support from the very first version, 3.1, and Macs could access Windows NT Server shares over the built-in Appleshare client, and store Mac files complete with their Resource Forks on NTFS volumes. From 1993 onwards this made mixed Mac/PC networks much easier.
I did subcontracted Mac support for a couple of friends of mine's consultancy businesses because they were Windows guys and didn't "speak Mac".
Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.
Macs were always there.
Maybe you didn't notice but they always were. Knowing PC/Mac integration was a key career skill for me, and the rise of OS X made the classic MacOS knowledge segue into more general Unix/Windows integration work.
Some power users defected to Windows NT between 1993 and 2001 but then it reversed and grew much faster: from around 2001, PowerMacs started to become a credible desktop workstation for power users because of OS X. From 2006, Macintel boxes became more viable in general business use because the Intel chips meant you could run Windows in a VM at full speed for one or two essential Windows apps. They ran IE natively and WINE started to make OS X feasible for some apps with no need for a Windows licence.
In other words, the rise of OS X coincided with the rise of Linux as a viable server and GUI workstation.
In Portugal there was only one single shop for the whole country, Interlog, located in Lisbon.
Wanted to get a Mac, needed to travel there, or order by catalogue, from magazine ads.
On my university there were about 5 LCs on a single room for students use, while the whole campus was full of PCs, and UNIX green/amber phosphor terminals to DG/UX rooms, on all major buildings.
Besides that single room, there were two more on the IT department, and that was about it.
When Apple was going down, between buying Be or NeXT as last survival decision, the fate of the university keeping those Macs around was being discussed.
>Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.
So, A/V production, something I said too. My point still stands. Macs in Europe were seen as something fancy for media production people and that's it. Something niche for the arts/press/TV/cinema world.
Nope. Wrong. My own extensive personal experience, travelling and working in multiple countries. Not true, never was.
Like I said, and you missed: but not only there.
People often mistake "Product A dominates in market B" -- meaning A outsells all others in B -- for "A only sells in market B."
Macs were expensive. Clone PCs were cheap. Yeah, cheap products outsell expensive ones. Doesn't mean that the expensive ones are some kind of fancy designer brand only used by the idle rich.
Yes, it was. I'm from Spain. The Macs where for media people, not for the common worker on a boring office, where MS dominated. At home, Macs where a thing maybe for some rounding percent from kids living in a loaded neighbour.
No one got Macs at school either. First DOS, then Windows 95/98. Maybe in some Universities they used Macbooks well into the OSX era, as a reliable Unix machine to compile legacy scientific stuff; and even in those environments GNU/Linux began to work perfectly well recompiling everything from Sparcs and the like with a much cheaper price.
Forget about pre-OSX machines in Spain outside of a newspaper/publishing/AV producing office. Also, by the time XP and 2000 were realiable enough against OSX (w9x was hell) that OS was replaced for much cheaper PC alternatives.
I mean, if w2k/wxp could handle big loads without BSODing every few hours, that was a success. And as the Pentium 4's with SSE2 and Core Duo's happened, suddenly G4's and G'5 weren't that powerful any more.
Whereas I lived (and am back, sadly) in an offshore tax haven.
The rich used Macs. Musicians used Macs. They were not some dedicated tool only found in certain places. Entire industries, big important industries, ran on them.
What killed Commodore and Atari was that in the end although they had niches, they didn't conquer whole sectors.
This is why Sinclair Research tried to push into the business market with the QL. Sir Clive knew that the home/games sector was about thin margins and price battles, while in rich America, you could get fat on it, you can't in Europe.
He carved out an early niche as the cheapest home computers that were good enough and were competitive, but it was low-margin/high-unit-count.
The business market will pay for good tools. Bits of it paid extra for Macs for decades because they were good at some things.
That is a viable long-term market: "the best cheap home computer for the money" is not.
Those machines could be pretty darn fast - if you get one and run the earliest software that still worked on. DOS-based apps would fly on a 486, even as Windows 95 would be barely usable.
They might have stolen the "patented method" (and i know how much u guys love patents), but they certainly did not steal the "idea". Software has had all sorts of horrible copy-protection for decades before this was introduced.
In the quoted source from the inventor -the inventor mentions his disbelief that Microsoft used the exact same parameters (that the inventor used ) as determined from the PC - I think things like MAC address etc to uniquely id the machine
That's part of what I meant "... steal the idea ..."
Of course, the comment that there are lots copy protection methods ( previously ) is correct
THe inventor also had to spend cira about $15M in legal fees to bring his case. ANd that is many years ago 15-20? so a much bigger $ today. A small company would have no chance to be able to afford such a financial outlay ... Microsoft was often accused of obtaining information under NDA then developing their own similar product etc
One case I recall was PEN computing. Pen Computing lost their case with the result "not proven" There where many more such cases, similar from smaller companies. Of course how many that where valid is unknown , since the court case often not go ahead, since small company not have resources ....
Not listening to a blahcast, but shit like MAC addresses and other hardware IDs were well known to everyone in the field. Companies had 'inventory systems' which used this long before MS cared. I certainly don't begrudge anyone from getting their patented pound of flesh from Gates, just pointing out this is a great litmus test between the GNU and the not.
A AI summary reposted (sorry if this not allowed ?) below
Australian inventor Ric Richardson pioneered software activation in the early 1990s, developing a "try-before-you-buy" system (Demoware) using a unique machine fingerprint and key-code unlocking system, now used on billions of computers.
His 1992 patent (US5490216) resulted in a major legal victory against Microsoft, ending in a confidential settlement valued at over $530 million.
Key details of the Ric Richardson patent and dispute:
The Invention: Richardson created a method for software anti-piracy where, upon purchase, a user receives a code to unlock full functionality, addressing the need to try software before buying.
Uniloc Company: Richardson founded Uniloc to develop and market this copy-protection software.
The Microsoft Dispute: In 1993, Richardson demonstrated his technology to Microsoft, which subsequently developed a similar activation system for products like Office, Windows XP, and Windows Server.
Legal Battle: After eight years of litigation, a US court found Microsoft infringed on the patent (Number 5,490,216), resulting in a settlement estimated to be in the low 9 figures (after earlier awards of $388 million, then over $530 million).
Legacy: The technology is widely used globally, and Richardson continued to innovate in cybersecurity, developing new, secure operating system methods.
What Microsoft actually did was make deals with OEMs and distributors so they got paid for every machine sold. In the 1980s, home computers had MS-BASIC in the ROMs, and PCs came with "Vendor DOS", you couldn't even buy MS-DOS.
Before then, a local clone store had an 'insane deal' on floppy disks, and they came with Slackware. I had a Mac, and the floppies weren't very good so.
I think MS Word was basically feature-complete with v4.0 which ran on a 1MB 68000 Macintosh. Obviously they have added lots of UI and geegaws, but the core word processing functionality hasn't really changed at all.
Small, medium and large colleges in the UK ran on Novell servers and 386 client machines with windows for workgroups and whatever Office they came with. I think the universities were using unixy minicomputers then though. Late 80s early 90s. Those 386 machines were built like tanks and survived the tender ministrations of hundreds of students (not to mention some of the staff).
I still use Office 2010 to this day and feel like absolutely nothing is missing that I truly need. The only issues are Alt-Tab and multiple monitors have bugs. But functionality? 100%.
When I was a kid, I had a green screen Apple, and I wish I knew about 3rd party RF modulators. (It didn't work with an Atari-style modulator.) I never saw a setup like that, so I wonder how common they really were.
Maybe 'typical' only in the very early days? I just never saw one plugged into a television rather than a computer monitor, nor did I ever hear about such a thing. I would have loved to play those games in color.
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