Recovery from RSI still in progress, so not much is going on.
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Booted my Pentium 133 today. Haven't done that for about a year.
I put in the hard disk with DOS and Windows 3.11 on it. For the younger
readers: That software is one generation *older* than the hardware
(which originally came with Windows 95). In other words, the computer
*appears to be* really fast, even though it only runs at 133 MHz and has
an old spinning disk ... but the software was so much simpler back then.
It's mind blowing every time to see the speed and performance of that
setup.
Plus, there is TCP/IP and a web browser (Netscape 4.0), an FTP client,
an IRC client, ... I even dug up a C compiler and there is also Quick
BASIC. I could install Microsoft Office, but I'm too lazy.
My point is: We haven't made much *fundamental* progress in the last
20-30 years, have we? Hardware got faster, software got slower, but the
essential tools have all been there in the 1980ies/1990ies. It's still
a keyboard and a pointer (mouse or touchscreen). There hasn't been a
revolution like "data gloves" or "neural interfaces". A bit sad,
actually.
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Solène writes about the "offline laptop experiment":
<
gopher://dataswamp.org/0/%7esolene/article-offline-laptop.txt>
Whoops, not really 100% offline. An IP network is just too damn useful,
and I agree. As I said, even my P133 has network access.
