Re: The good old days.

["Simon North" <sintac -at- home -dot- nl>]

They weren't ALL good of course. 

I was given (well, I swapped it for a crate of beer) a PDP 11/44 about 12 years ago. It takes 
at least 2 people to mount a hard disk; the darn things weighs about 80 kg. The CPU alone 
draws 4 kW ... and from a cold start it takes me about 18 hours to do a full reboot. There are 
16 manuals for the basic system, plus another 22 for the OS (RSX 11 ... but it's still a 
wonderful machine. 

And as for the PC, well it wasn't all good either ... and I don't mean the usual complaints 
about Windows. Does anyone remember Lotus Manuscript? or dBase ... 

As for mice ... I think I tried them all; mice, with 2, 3, 4 and 5 buttons, pucks, trackballs (my 
first trackball weighed about 80 lbs and cost an arm and a leg), touch pads, joysticks ... 
been using a Wacom pen pad for the last 9 years or so and haven't looked back since. 
I pick them up ridiculously cheap on eBay .. I now have 8 A5 units (it was easier to pay $2 
for a pad to get the spare pen than pay $30 for a replacement pen), 4 A4 units, 2 A3 units 
and a huge A2 unit ... one of these days -- in my dreams -- I'll buy a Cintiq. 

There are a few packages (a very few) that have *really* survived the test of time: 
Vim (mentioned before), Norton Commander (or Total Commander these days ... I 
still hate copying files by drag & drop), PFE (professional file editor ... the simple macro 
keystroke recording is priceless), and Pegasus Mail. 

Simon. 

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