They sold a pretty decent x86 Unix throughout the 80s and early 90s.

They did no such thing. SCO Unix was, by far, the worst one. Nearly as unreliable as Windows. Just as an example, their serial port driver was so bad, you had to download an open source driver (Final Asynchronous Solution, anyone?) to get serial ports to work properly, especially if you were using a modem. And Deity help you if you accidentally started getty on a port with modem control enabled, and no modem...

One that enslaves women and snips their clits is bad. If you can't say that, you need to do some soul searching.

I think maybe you need to address the plank in your eye, before you talk about the motes in others.

We don't treat women that much better in the US. Australia has nearly eliminated cervical cancer, because of the HPV vaccine (https://www.hpvworld.com/articles/australia-on-track-to-be-the-first-country-to-achieve-cervical-cancer-elimination/), but we can't require it here, because it might encourage women to have sex outside marriage.

Likewise, the US doesn't think cancers that affect women are as important as the ones that affect men; when my wife got ovarian cancer, the doctors basically threw everything at it, hoping something would work, because they knew almost nothing about it. Breast cancer, on the other hand, is pretty treatable, because it affects men.

If you can't say those things are bad, you're the one who needs to do some soul-searching.

Error 404: Moon not found

Why are they still in business, again?

The quality of a product is not nearly as important as the quality of its marketing.

I've got tapes from the 80s I can still read - 9-track and QIC - so I doubt it's as bad as that.

Interesting. My OSI C4P BASIC in ROM says:

WRITTEN BY RICHARD W. WEILAND.
OSI 6502 BASIC VERSION 1.0 REV 3.2
COPYRIGHT 1977 BY MICROSOFT CO.

Makes me wonder how much the other guys actually contributed.

that should be good for almost no one

https://petapixel.com/2025/01/...

We had old billing systems (think: AOS/VS II hosted COBOL

If I remember correctly, AOS/VS stored dates as a 16-bit number that represented the number of days since some time in 1967. It should theoretically have been good until at least 2100.

VR can't replace the real world.

Exactly. To flesh out your idea a little further, VR won't take off until it's like the holodeck on Start Trek. How do I run across a huge hallway or field, that I might see in the latest FPS game, if I live in an apartment?

We have to thank BASIC for Microsoft.

Sadly, you're probably right. I still have an OSI C4P, from roughly 1978. It prints the following message when it boots:

OSI 6502 BASIC VERSION 1.0 REV 3.2
COPYRIGHT 1977 BY MICROSOFT CO.

If you actually look in the BASIC ROM, it says "WRITTEN BY RICHARD W. WEILAND".

I'm so old I can remember when there was Windows/NT for the PowerPC

And DEC's Alpha

When they released Windows for the Alpha, everyone at my old job was like "Woo hoo! No more Unix!", and we started porting our software to Windows. Then we started doing benchmarks.

That was the last time anyone mentioned Windows on our servers.

people who voluntarily give information to third parties ... have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information

I could see their point, if it was actually voluntary, but banks, phone service, and ISPs are basically required by today's society.

Personally, I think someone (with more money than most of us) should buy that same information for all Secret Service, FBI, and DHS employees, and make it publicly available.

Python is the go-to for unmaintable, once-off, kludges.

Not in my experience. Just recently, we had had to connect a third-party piece of software to a messaging server (IBM MQ). I did it in Python in a couple of weekends, with about 300 lines of code. Unfortunately, we're officially a C# shop, so they paid a consultant to write a new program in C#. It took him eight months and I don't know how many lines of code.

Sorry, but I don't see how you could call 300 lines of code unmaintainable.

The basic x86 instruction set is 46 years old. 8086 was released in 1978.

And it has far outlived its usefulness. How much farther ahead could we have been in computer technology if we'd standardized on a better architecture?

I'm not planning on upgrading from Windows 7

I'd like to do the same, but the only thing I use Windows for is games, and more and more games are refusing to run on Win7.