You are not a "real" programmer until you've done serial I/O by flipping an output toggle up and down by hand on the front panel! ;-)

No, people didn't buy them "because they wanted to use them as Chromebooks"

People buy computers in order to do things with them. For example, my wife got hers to replace a Windows XP netbook.
The logic: "It does everything I need it to do and is about half the weight of the old Asus netbook".

People don't buy a computer in order to use this or that OS - they buy it to do things with.
They're scared off of using one OS or another by people telling them that it'll be too difficult to learn.

(which is utter BS!!)

Mike

Too right, Tom - C is definitely for grown-ups!

RTL/2 was fun. There waere two commands - CODE and RTL - between which you could write plain assembler code. It only compiled if you used the right compiler switch! You could also do things like copying a Char to and In to find out which char it was by ansi number if you used that magic compiler switch!

Least-used feature in a language?

Has GOT to be the FORTRAN keyword in C, which allows you to embed FORTRAN inside a C program !

Mike
--
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up that right you shall be elected.

That's not "ease of use"

That's "ease of being stupid"

Most people drive cars but never think twice about how the engine works (or even what the "2.5" on the model name plate means!) and certainly never complain. Why do we insist on removing useful things from software because sine idiot in marketing thinks that a dumb user will get confused?

Mike

  Common Sense - rare enough to be classified as a super power!

carrot and caret are NOT homophones in English. You need to tune your ears more carefully!

I never upgraded to a VAX - I scrounged a PDP 11/40 (3 racks of wire-wrapped cores!) from my employers, and that heated the flat very well!

If you can live with "only" 32 GB then try a System-76 Bonobo and Windows in a VM like VirtualBox.