Hidden Talents and Special Abilities

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Windows will never get me alive, I'm emigrating to Antarctica, I'm going to join the penguin tribe

I hope you find happiness on an ice floe

"Windows" and "better" dont mix. Putting them in the same sentence is dangerous. Universe might implode.

No, Windows for the most part just keeps getting worse, I think. I mean, Windows 7 was pretty decent (still running it on this machine... I REFUSE TO GIVE IN, MICROSOFT!! !)... 8 is terrible, 10 is another version of 8, 9 vanished into the ether (???) and before those, the last decent version of Windows, IMHO, was... 3.1. I miss 3.1. It was a bit like DOS; it only really did what you told it. It didnt try to do 10 squillion useless tasks in the background without you knowing it.

Hell, the ORIGINAL versions of Windows, the really old ones, werent even the core OS of most computers. They actually ran under DOS, which was the actual core (I dont care what the actual term is, I'm calling it the "core" because I can). The machine tended to boot up Windows automatically upon startup, but you could stop it from loading at all, and completely operate the machine without it running. And even when it was loading, you could see on the screen that it was very obviously a batch file with the command to load Windows jammed into it, in most cases (and batch files were just about the most simplistic DOS files there were). That was... that was a happy feature. So you could CHOOSE wether to rely on it or not. It didnt force you to do anything, or load anything.

Now it's the other way around... ugh. DOS was reduced to the mere "Command Prompt" eventually, and remains so now. Most people dont know that this is there. And of course it's not "full" DOS, just a facsimile of it. Gotta have DOSBox for the real thing, or as close as you can get anyway. The old DOS is gone.

I mourn it's loss.


And on the note of missing things, I'll admit I kinda miss those old modems. Connecting to the Net just isnt the same without the screaming electronics.

I stuck with the squealing modems longer than most, out in the sticks we didn't get even watered down DSL until 2003.

I didn't have DSL until about 2008 here in the US.

I got it as soon as it finally became available here. when did dsl roll out in your neighborhood?

It had been available for many years before then. We just had not investigated the offerings until we made the switch.

I was so tired of de-contented web-pages taking two minutes to load, so I was always checking when the phone company was gonna extend the DSL service out close to me, it didn't happen until walmart built a store down the road and they insisted as a condition of putting a store out here that the phone company upgrade the phone lines. so thanx to wally world I got DSL finally

I would just like to offer some quick feedback for auntblabby, greenlynx, Misery, and MissAlgernon. Thank you all for your contributions to this thread, and just to show that your posts are most certainly on-topic, you have collectively demonstrated the following talents and abilities: Able to make use of highly specialised knowledge (in this case, said knowledge is in the field of computers/computing); able to hold a genuinely interesting and engaging conversation (which is far from easy for many people); initiating deep feelings of nostalgia whilst giving us all a viable history lesson. Awesome!!

^^^prego

Thanks for the kind compliment!

I can get goose bumps at anytime of the day at an order without thinking about anything gross. I have not seen so many do that. In fact once on TV for some kind of freak show.

Otherwise I am generally good at learning new languages (although none of 5 languages I know are far beyond perfection.), math, physics, programmings and so on. I am better than average on these things but not in a way that makes me think that these are my special ability other than getting goose bumps

And here I thought we all just very randomly derailed it... Like a train launching into a chasm. Or something.

I withheld a train joke