Indeed! I also made an X1541 many moons ago, and use Star Commander (http://sta.c64.org/sc.html) as an emultor.
All my Bank Street Writer files from 1985-1990 are fully accessible, which is mostly a collection of school projects and essays, not to mention MOST everything else (mostly games)... very few disc read failures. I never thought I'd be reading 25 year old 5.25 floppies!

Oh, I'm not saying that there were NO HDs back in 85/86/87, but I think you'd agree that the number of machines that were floppy only probably outnumbered HD systems by a pretty wide margin -- maybe three to one (or more).
Ah! That's clearer now. Okay, I agree re: Windows 386 then.
Yes, of course you could, but my point was more that you could be running Windows apps. (Or you just formatted the discs in DOS of course...)
I agree Excel helped to carry the day but a big piece of that was because it was so interoperable with Word. There were a LOT of holdouts from 1-2-3. When Word finally vanquished WordPerfect 5.1/6.1 that was as big a deal IMO.

I call shenanigans!
* Windows 1.0 was MS-DOS EXEC. It didn't have an installation. Also, what drives are you referring to? As I recall hard drives were pretty scarce in 1985 (heck, even into 1988 when IDE really got going), as most XTs (and early ATs) were dual floppy systems!
* Yet Windows 2.0 manged to be successful enough that Apple sued Microsoft (in a 189 point lawsuit) over the same look & feel they "borrowed" from Xerox.
* Also, Windows/386 was a version of Windows 2.1. So much for it being a failure.
* Exactly how did running Windows 3.0 slow down DOS programs when you had to shell into Windows from DOS? Unless you put Win (or Win: to avoid the spashscreen) into your autoexec.bat, it was a manual process to load Windows!
* For that matter, why run DOS programs on Windows 3.11? You still had to shell to it from DOS, though by this time some companies had begun changing the autoexec.bat on their machines (Blackship, Fast Data and Dell come to mind).
BUT! By the time it was released (31 December 1993), Microsoft Office for Windows was already on version 3, and 4 was out a few months later. Nevermind the competing products like Lotus Smartsuite 1994, cc:Mail/Microsoft Mail or even AutoCAD . Or a little thing called Mosaic, which of course led to Internet Explorer... which also ran on Windows 3.11... as did Netscape. Have you ever heard of Novell Netware or Windows NT 3.51? WfW was the corporate client du jour for *years* (they bought it, mostly) and it's success paved the way for Windows 95.

As opposed to what... using bright, shiny polychromatic plastic cases?

As someone who in 1991 ordered his 386/SX (4MB RAM, 80MB hard drive and 256k VGA card) with MS DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0, I'm amazed that OS/2 isn't mentioned in the article since it was the other OS option at the time.

Largest by what standard? By revenue, it would be Hewlett-Packard, followed by IBM, Dell and Microsoft and would take 3 Apples to make one HP.

It was a ploy to reduce production costs when it was done in Galactica: 1980. With CGI that's not really an issue.

Nope! I solved the original Diablo at least twice. I only dimly recall, but the game had four stages, the last of which you were in a church-like thing. There was a guy that walked around and occasionally crossed and knelt as if in prayer. There was some kind of dungeon where you entered onto a double staircase with about 100 things that wanted to kill you. And if you activated them the game overloaded and laaaaaged.

I wonder what network the were using in 1928? Marconi Wireless? (snicker)
Seriously, this has been in the media for days now. It's almost certainly someone using an old-style hearing aid.

Is memory failing me, or is this the same Diablo 2 which got drastically worse with every segment, as was bascially unplayable after the 3rd piece? I recall having to reload a fight after going down a flight of stairs about 50 times to just get a strike in. I also recall the graphics getting worse and worse...

Because technology is fleeting, but paper remains (at least for a few hundred years).
Consider that the best backup tapes from ten years ago are generally unreadable in most organizations. Nevermind things like Bernoulis, ZIP discs, CDs, 8mm tapes -- it all goes in the junkpile. There is simply no permanent technological solution available at any price. We have a hard time today reading the old NASA tapes from Apollo (and we saved some of that equipment!) Imagine what happens in 2110 when someone wants to find something?
Heck, even the "Digital Doomsday book" lasted only 15 years instead of 1000! http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning

And constantly re-scanning everything in existance every 10 years is not an option. :-(

I used to watch him after Doctor Who on PBS in the 80's... it'd be the last thing on WEDW before they went off the air. Jack, you got me to walk out the back door and look up more than once and made living in the middle of the woods all that much more tolerable. Thanks for getting me interested in Astronomy, I already miss you.

For the majority Americans (except in Hawaii), the only language they encounter besides English is Spanish (and French in Maine & Louisiana). Personally, I speak English, Polish, Slovak and a bit of Spanish, German and Czech. OTOH, my relatives in Poland speak Polish and my relatives in Slovakia speak Slovak. Oh, they may know a few words of Russian, German or English (depending on when they went to school), but they never use it and so forget it mostly. It's great that you were able to pick up those tongues, but would you go learn (say) Finnish or Tagalog on a whim? Probably not. It's not a matter of being lazy, it's a mater of use.

It may have not been a perfect copy, but it was most certainly the product of espianoge. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18686550/ns/technology_and_science-space/ I remember this story from when I was in elementary school... funny to look back and see what was true and what wasn't. http://books.google.com/books?id=3AAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=soviet+spies+copy+shuttle+plans+from+library+of+congress&source=bl&ots=lYosOCOXtd&sig=ByCga3UHDaLFqsfmajHwvJ97GgQ&hl=en&ei=RTgvTPnuHMKAlAeb55HWCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBMQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q&f=false

I was referring to the new faith of "Global Warming".
If they'd not have destroyed data, not conspired to bend/hide the data, not modified data and generally not taking on the "because we say so" POV, I'd consider them scientists and not second rate evangelists.
And if you consider science to be what you say it is in your first paragraph, you'd agree that what the sciece behind "Global Warming" is about as scientific as The Bible. That is, it's a lot of parables taken on faith.

I fondly remember "the good old days" when Science didn't require faith.
Also, religion isn't dead in Europe -- it's just become unfashionable in some areas and/or circles.