The funny thing is I still take a lot of my work meeting notes on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 that was given to me last year. I constantly get people asking me what it is, where to get one, etc. Its keyboard isn't amazing, but it beats a lot of the add-on keyboards people are using (or trying to use) with their tablets, plus it's a lot more durable. It's also running a full Linux setup which I've used for some light development, writing sd cards for a couple embedded projects, and had no trouble with a lot of USB peripherals.

It may not be as cool as a lot of new tablets, and its battery life may not be up to what it was when it was new, but it's been a great thing for me. I have a 7" Android tablet too and haven't found a decent keyboard for it yet that isn't more than I want to pay. But the tablet does do media a lot better, Youtube and Netflix and such. So I tend to keep the netbook for work and the tablet for lying in bed watching something on Netflix. /csb

I've always felt that Apple's problem is they hit on a successful, good formula, and then ride it into the ground and well past its sell-by date. Original Macintosh was something new and interesting, but they were still making the Mac Classic into the early 90s which was fundamentally similar and did poorly outside education (trying to sell a non-color 8mhz computer when PCs were at 33 and 66mhz? Really?). The early color Macs were interesting, but they got bogged down in the confusing product lines and corner-cutting such as the 5200/5300/6200/6300 models. The classic Mac OS was great for 1984, but it was already out of date by the early 90s much less Mac OS 9 running into the early 2000s.

If they were better able to recognize when a market was done and when they needed to bring out new products, they'd probably do well swinging back and forth. They've been on a big upswing since the iProducts and Mac OS X were introduced, but it can't last forever. Granted it's anecdotal and hardly indicative of anything but I have several Apple fan friends who bought Galaxy S3s because they were unhappy with the iPhone 5. It's probably still got several years left but it'll be interesting to see if Apple leverages their iOS lead and fandom into a new world, or we end up in a world of Performas and Centrises again.

Not that I care personally, I'll keep my Android and Linux thanks. More an academic interest as a computer guy.

30 pin SIMMS are readily available at least up to 16MB a stick, they're used frequently in the vintage Mac world to get the likes of SE/30s and IIcis up to 128 MB of RAM. I can't say they're the biggest but it's the biggest I've seen.

Here

They're really surprisingly affordable for what they are. I suspect they'd work fine in the majority of 386 boards (and I've seen 386 boards with 8 SIMM slots)

Like many electronics, you have the choice of going cheap/basic or expensive/fancy. Some mobo makers are better about providing lots of overclock options, sometimes down to the single MHz on the bus/etc. Not to mention various choices in onboard peripherals - some people don't mind onboard NICs and sound, or even video, while others want absolutely minimum on the board at all and go for high-power enthusiast options.

Don't feel bad, I've been using Windows since the 3.1 days and had to google on how to shut down as well. I can only assume it's further design of the tablet-intended nature of the OS where you generally don't fully shut down.

It's interesting how polarizing the opinions on the N64 controllers are. I played the hell out of N64 games when they were current as a teenager, and to this day I still find the N64 controller one of the most comfortable and natural controllers to use. So I wonder if childhood acclimation has anything to do with it. (I feel the same about the Atari 2600/800 standard Joystick, which also has similar polarizing opinion). On the other hand, I never cared for Genesis controllers even though many people preferred them to the alternatives at the time. I didn't get a Genesis until only a year or two ago.

Absolutely agree on the durability (or lack thereof). There's several replacement thumbsticks using Gamecube-style sticks that look like they'd be a nice upgrade. May have to grab a few for mine.

Never had a problem with cooling, and the only cart I have that doesn't work is a Mario Kart 64 that looks like someone left it outside for a year or two.

Not to mention most of these were complete rewrites in just about every sense of the word. For example, King's Quest 1 and Space Quest 1 were both redone from their original low-res EGA to high res EGA and VGA with mouse support and such. This would have been sprites and backgrounds and animations and everything. There wouldn't have been much able to be reused between the two (though I don't know the internals of the AGI/SCI stuff, maybe they could import some of the scripts and such).

On the other hand, given the continued functioning of some glitches in Nintendo's stuff, it's clear that some of their updates are abstractions running on top of original ROMs.

This is another of those sorta-kinda things. Apple's hard drive formatting software refused to work on most third party drives. There were/are resedit hacks that allow it to work, but in the pre-internet days such things were touchy.

This led to the proliferation and great success of a lot of third-party disk formatting utilities and drivers like FWB Toolkit, Anubis SCSI tools, etc. IIRC it was around the Mac OS 8 era when it was made more universal.

There's a free version for Autohotkey that works decently on a standard keyboard available here. I used it a bit and decided it wasn't for me but it might be usable.

Tell me about it with the truck driver one. I had a run-in with one of those a few months ago, just finally got my car fixed from this. He didn't even realize he'd hit me for a moment, I could see him turning the wheel more trying to figure out why his truck wasn't turning.

Fortunately I knew the guy from work so he was more embarrassed than anything, but it was a pain.

Amiga has had most of those for some time now. But I still agree with your point that comparing computers from that long ago to modern times is silly. My Atari 800 boots into its cartridge-based DOS in something like a second and a half but it's hardly a fair benchmark for modern PCs.

I usually go by the rule of threes for Microsoft. It's usually their third attempt at things that succeeds. Windows 3.0 was the first one that made traction. NT 4 was the third version of NT (3.1, 3.5x, 4.0) and the first that really got great traction. 98 SE was the third 9x and probably the best. XP SP2 was the third version of XP and where they finally got it right. It breaks down after that, I suppose, though you could sort of go with XP-Vista-7 in NT-based consumer OSes?

Incidentally, sometimes I wonder if I'm the only geek that never had major trouble with 95 (or at least, no more trouble than later 9x versions). It was a huge upgrade from 3.1 in almost every way.

I had two history teachers across several years use the same phrase in a couple different states. It's probably pretty common.

Not to mention I've been running various Linuxes on tablets since at least the 486/40 Toshiba Dynapad T200CS still stuck in my closet. People seem to forget that tablets weren't invented when the iPad came out and have been around forever.