My grandfather had a CoCo. Whenever I visited (which was fairly often as my grandparents were less than an hour away at the time), I worked through the tutorials in Getting Started with Color BASIC . Eventually, I got a TI-99/4A at home, and then an Apple IIe. All of those put me on the path to where I am today, 40+ years later.

Exactly. It's like taking a look at ENIAC and thinking 'welp, this technology will never be commercially successful, and I can't really think of a use for it.'

On the other hand, PDAs went from 'useless toy' to 'corporate status symbol' to 'literally redefining how society works' in less than twenty five years.

People live their lives through their phone. There's a qualitative difference.

Like why your car requires a seatbelt and airbags, but your snowmobile doesn't.

The same people paying for the gas/diesel transportation, storage, and distribution stations?

Do you think pioneers just find giant underground fuel tanks and wild-grown gas pumps naturally sprouting along highways?

It's true. The last time I upgraded ram in a laptop was a Toshiba Satellite Pro back in like 1999.

Otherwise, we just, you know, spec the initial laptop purchase properly.

Yeah, I never had a problem with IRQ/DMA fuckery having a pretty loaded up (for the time) machine; Awe32 with Waveblaster daughterboard, ATI Rage 64 card, etc etc.

The main challenges back then were dealing with your low memory; figuring out the exact right order to load mscdex, memory manager, mouse driver and every thing else to squeeze out every bit of conventional memory, and using loadhigh to squeeze what you could into UMA, because that 1 kb difference could mean Wing Commander 2 didn't play the speech packs.

So you're saying not to hire people from San Francisco?

Not speaking for the OP, but yes. :)

No, my point is explicitly that, gas car or BEV, if I'm driving from St. Catharines to North Bay, I'm stopping an on route just south of Barrie to eat. With a gas car, I'm fueling up, then eating. With a BEV, I'm plugging in, then eating.

The fact that *you* wouldn't do it the way *I* do it doesn't negate the fact that for my process, which includes a half-hour break *either way,* it's more efficient to charge while taking that break than it is to fuel up, then take that break.