[nylug-talk] LSB/FHS filesystem silliness, developer silliness

[wdg3rd@comcast.net]

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Ajai Khattri <ajai at bitblit.net>
> On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, wdg3rd at comcast.net wrote:
> 
> > Yeah, you better smile when you use that nickname, son.  Nobody in Fort 
> > Worth realized how the initials of Tandy/Radio Shack would be abused by 
> > those who bought inferior machines with crappy 6502 CPUs.
> 
> Firstly, there were no 6809-based micros in the UK (apart from the 
> short-lived Dragon 32 and the already-mentioned Trash 80).

When the nickname (which was rarely if ever applied to the Color Computer) originated, the main machines on the market (in the States -- I rarely followed the British market) were the TRS-80 (Z-80 CPU), the Pet, the Apple ][ and the Atari 400.  The Color Computer wasn't introduced until the Summer of 1980, a few months before I started employment at the RSCC in Las Vegas, NV.

I simply found the 6502 architecture to be tedious.  I liked the Zilog instruction set, I really liked the 6809 instruction set.  I haven't done any assembly programming in over 20 years and probably never will again, as I detest the Intel instruction sets from the 8086 on.  Actually, I'll probably continue to do 90% of my coding in Bash, ksh and other descendents of the Bourne shell, with occasional bits of Perl.  (The other 10% is in BASIC on my antiques).

It simply amazes the hell out of me at some of the wonderful stuff that was done with the 6502, considering that I'd never be willing to use it for much more than an X-10 controller.

Many years I've wondered what the world would be like if VisiCalc hadn't been available on the Apple for a year and more before it ran on anything else.  The number of bookkeepers and accountants who bought Apples just because of the one program is what provided Apple with the cash to survive long enough to rip off Xerox and introduce the Lisa and Mac.  Without it, they would have been titsup by 1982 at the latest.  And without the rivalry between Microsoft and Apple that drove the development of Point-and-Drool interfaces so fast and furious, things might have been just a little less strenuous and a little more literate this last decade or so.  Microsoft might have kept on developing Xenix, for instance.
--
Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net

When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz.       Doug Newman