Complete nightmare!! A cassette interface was a disaster on *every* platform I used it with. Had a neighbor growing up who ran a fitness business, and he a Coleco Adam for his business ( or to play Buck Rogers... ). I helped them set it up, seemed cool enough at first but that damned Coleco tape drive was finicky. But then after a couple weeks, wow - it started eating tapes all the time. My own Atari 800 would regularly error out loading tapes. I got the disk drive eventually too because the computer was almost unusable, except what you wrote on your own or to type those massive magazine programs by hand - and screw that.

Truth, thatâ(TM)s a really bad example I thought of considering who was running our space program. I have to remember not to get on Slashdot after going out.

My brother in Christ, did you read that list without thinking about these things and how he did them? Letâ(TM)s start with the last, âlowered rates of mental illness & physical disability in the country for some time after the warâ(TM) He did that by killing them. Is that what you consider to be an acceptable solution to mental illness & disability? âoeHis war machine was responsible for some of the greatest advances in technology and science the world has ever seen âoe He also did this to kill people & take over their countries. Iâ(TM)d actually argue our Apollo program was a greater advance of technology & science and *we didnâ(TM)t need to cook people in ovens to get there*. ( Apollo 1 doesnâ(TM)t count, donâ(TM)t be funny. ) The jobs, the unification, etc etc.. do you know how they did that? By making the Jews, Communists, trade union members, gays, the above mentioned disabled & mentally ill, etc public enemies. So you werenâ(TM)t just killing your neighbors, if you were a good Nazi, you got their house & possessions too. And their jobs. So while you might consider the ends all well and good, the problem is the means to get there. That is the problem. And after the war, the allies were faced with that exact question, when all the âresearchâ(TM) that was done with prisoners- the altitude tests, water temperature survival tests, gas effects, poisons, etc, the âresearchâ(TM) Japanâ(TM)s Unit 731 - was destroyed. Because the ends do *not* justify the means, and that is the line between civilization & tyranny. So no, even tyrants canâ(TM)t do good while being evil. And some people still canâ(TM)t get that though their heads.

Yea, I think around my 50th birthday I just stopped fighting it. No matter how many warnings over the last 30 years, we're still let it happen - and now we're teetering on the edge of climate disaster. But we knew this was going to happen in the 70s, even earlier - i think the 1950s it was predicted. And still, nobody seems to give a crap. Or at least a large number of people don't, and they even attack the idea of climate change as being ridiculous. Yet, when I was a kid, we'd see winter snow storms a few times a year with snow so deep you could tunnel through it from one house to another, never seeing daylight. 4-6 feet. I recently found a photo album with some pictures during storms, it's insane how much snow used to fall. And now, in winter, it's like Spring used to be. And the fall? It's October, supposed to be freezing, and I think it's 67F - it was 75 the other day. It's happening right in front of our eyes, and I've been talking about the danger ever since I became aware of the climate threat & projections in the early 1990s. I'm done now. I wish everyone luck, except the climate change deniers.

This ^ I've been on iCloud since it was called iTools, and iTunes so long that every mp3 I had ripped was uploaded to one version of Apple's iTunes/internet music solutions ( I haven't looked yet if I can get them back or if all the files will be AAC ). I've got AirPods, a relatively new Apple watch, a MacBook, iPad. I'm at point in time where I'd usually upgrade this stuff, and Apple's iPhone release was just meh. And I am really intrigued by the Samsung Fold phones - or Google's for that matter - but the idea of switching just seems so damned ugly and perilous because so much of my digital life is going to be stuck in Apple's ecosystem.

Let's see if those bastards can read anything with all the f*ing spam in my gmail account...

The fact you only have two choices, both bad, should tell you enough.

I guess you were just absent the day they taught computer history and the developments in the 70s and early 80s that created the computer revolution. You know, those boomers like Steve Wozniak and his colleagues at the Homebrew Computer Club. But go on, tell us all how much you have to learn kid.