Apple iPad Event - 16 Oct 2014

I do remember that the Mac SE had room for a whopping 4 MB of RAM. Seems funny now, but considering Bill Gates was telling us that we would never need more than the 640 KB max that his DOS PCs came with, it was a lot. I think the early Macs came with 128 KB, but by the SE model they had upped that to 1 MB expandable to 4 MB, but obviously they wanted to be the ones to upgrade it for you by making it difficult to open.

[FlorenceArt]

I think the first Mac my Dad bought had 64 Kb of RAM, which he later upgraded to 128. It also had one (1) floppy disk drive, period. You had the OS (the system) on one disk and your apps on other disks, and you had to switch them all the time. The Mac ejected the disk automatically and waited for you to insert the app disk, then it asked for the system disk again, and so on. Pretty soon we had an additional external disk drive, and later, a hard drive.

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

I think the first Mac my Dad bought had 64 Kb of RAM, which he later upgraded to 128. It also had one (1) floppy disk drive, period. You had the OS (the system) on one disk and your apps on other disks, and you had to switch them all the time. The Mac ejected the disk automatically and waited for you to insert the app disk, then it asked for the system disk again, and so on. Pretty soon we had an additional external disk drive, and later, a hard drive.

Oh yeah that is right, I forgot the early ones only had one floppy drive. My first Mac was the Mac SE in 1985 while in graduate school. It had two floppy drives, just like many of the DOS PCs on the market. For the PCs, you had to have the OS on one floppy and the app plus data on the other. The PCs took forever to boot up. I cannot remember how long the Mac SE took. But as far as writing went the Mac was WYSIWYG whereas the DOS PCs had to use colors to show bold, italics, underlining, etc. So the Mac was a college student's dream computer back then. I didn't have to guess what the printed pages would look like. On the PCs though, you had to guess because they only showed 40 monospaced characters across the screen and absolutely none of the formatting except through using various colors.

[WillAdams]

The original Mac had 128KB of RAM. One could double that to 256KB by soldering on additional RAM. Later, Apple released the ``Fat'' Mac which had 512KB and the Mac Plus had 1MB standard (4x256KB SIMMs) and could be expanded to 4MB (4x1MB SIMMs).

Anyone who's curious about the early Mac should browse through http://www.folklore.org/

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Yep, that was during the sans-Jobs era. As soon as he returned that ended.

Actually, Jobs was the reason the G3s and G4s had easy-access handles. He was intimately involved with those design decisions. The machines that were built in his absence didn't have them at all.

The first time that Mac Pros became impossible to open was in 2013, long after Jobs was dead.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Back to Windows and that lovely message every third time I turn it on, "You have 785758555757457457547457 updates ready to install, and Adobe wants to know if they can totally eff up your computer at the same time with their bloatware crap."

This is precisely why I love linux.
Updates are applied behind the scenes, IF you configure it, or else wait for explicit user requests. If a reboot is required, it says so ONCE. Updates are applied directly onto a running system and loaded at next boot, no "configuring".

[shalym]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

This is precisely why I love linux.
Updates are applied behind the scenes, IF you configure it, or else wait for explicit user requests. If a reboot is required, it says so ONCE. Updates are applied directly onto a running system and loaded at next boot, no "configuring".

...and you can set up your Windows computer to do the same thing, if you want. For me, I would NEVER allow updates to anything to be applied without asking me first, so no matter what OS I'm on, I see that kind of message if it's been a few months since I used the device.

Shari

PS...I really don't want to get into an OS discussion here, just pointing out that Windows can be configured to behave the same way that you have your Linux box set up. FUD is such an unnecessary thing...

[eschwartz]

Actually, it is the configuring that kills it for me. I am aware the rest can be set up, but it's worth noting that some OSes have sane defaults.

Please tell me if you can figure out how to set up Windows to install updates while the PC is running rather than waiting for you to be halfway through rebooting, though. I haven't been able to figure that one out.

[Fluribus]

Windows updates can be a pain. But I've never had a Windows update kill the OS so badly that it could no longer boot. I have had that with Ubuntu. Up until that point, I had been quite happy with Ubuntu.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Fluribus

Windows updates can be a pain. But I've never had a Windows update kill the OS so badly that it could no longer boot. I have had that with Ubuntu. Up until that point, I had been quite happy with Ubuntu.

I have never had a linux update do that, and I am running a far more fragile distro.

On the other hand, I have had several Windows OSes simply die for no reason at all. At least Ubuntu was down to something you actually did...

In Windows it is not when they want to update so much as that they constantly want to update. It is like a kid in the backseat constantly asking, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" It is just annoying that the OS requires so damn many updates! It is especially annoying when Windows replaces perfectly good and working drivers for some new POS driver that causes me an hours worth of pain trying to figure out what just happened, then I have to try to find the older driver that works.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by jswinden

In Windows it is not when they want to update so much as that they constantly want to update. It is like a kid in the backseat constantly asking, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" It is just annoying that the OS requires so damn many updates! It is especially annoying when Windows replaces perfectly good and working drivers for some new POS driver that causes me an hours worth of pain trying to figure out what just happened, then I have to try to find the older driver that works.

Why would a driver install automatically? I've never seen one included under important updates, or even under recommended updates. I didn't even know that it was possible to have optional updates install automatically.

Shari

Originally Posted by shalym

Why would a driver install automatically? I've never seen one included under important updates, or even under recommended updates. I didn't even know that it was possible to have optional updates install automatically.

Shari

Whether it is automatically, which I'm pretty sure has happened in at least a few cases as I never knowingly authorized the driver updates that occurred, or by accidental approval because you get a zillion popup windows asking you to accept this or that, it is still annoying. The worst occurrences seem to happen when the Windows OS goes through an update. I often start having driver issues after doing a major or mid-level OS update, and when I dig into the issues I find updated drivers that I never authorized. Perhaps the updates make decisions on drivers that are older and determine they should be updated, like it not, and just updates them. That is my guess. It is annoying though as I have radio cables that I use to connect radios to my computer to program them, and Windows keeps replacing the drivers. Most of these cables only work with drivers from 2007 and earlier. I'm getting really tired of having to re-install the older drivers several times each year because Windows updated them for some reason.

[Fluribus]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Whether it is automatically, which I'm pretty sure has happened in at least a few cases as I never knowingly authorized the driver updates that occurred, or by accidental approval because you get a zillion popup windows asking you to accept this or that, it is still annoying. The worst occurrences seem to happen when the Windows OS goes through an update. I often start having driver issues after doing a major or mid-level OS update, and when I dig into the issues I find updated drivers that I never authorized. Perhaps the updates make decisions on drivers that are older and determine they should be updated, like it not, and just updates them. That is my guess. It is annoying though as I have radio cables that I use to connect radios to my computer to program them, and Windows keeps replacing the drivers. Most of these cables only work with drivers from 2007 and earlier. I'm getting really tired of having to re-install the older drivers several times each year because Windows updated them for some reason.

I have had USB devices that go through the new device bit when I haven't plugged them into my PC for a while.

I just went through a Windows 8.0 update on a relative's laptop. That was all kinds of hell. Had to fully update 8.0 with the update tool. Updates failed to configure and reverted. I had to do the updates in small bites and run the update repair tool multiple times. To update to 8.1, I had to go to the app store. Worst Windows experience that I've ever had.