[TheForge] Removal of Norton

[Jerry Frost]

Yeah, my first comp had a tape drive, one floppy and spoke Pet basic. My
second was a 386-33 with a 30 meg HD and a both size floppies. I learned Pet
basic a lot faster than I thought and was able to just buy the software I
wanted for the PC, so never learned C. Getting everything to work was the
only learning curve but once I figured out how ITs think wasn't really much
problem. They all seemed to make the same stupid mistakes. Whatever they'd
written SHOULD be first in the que so just reassigning them did it, same for
the device problems. The guys who designed SCSI did the exact same thing but
made it much harder to reassign device number and I believe that's the main
reason the SCSI interface died so quickly.

THEN I got to talking to an Apple guy who convinced me Apple was a superior
product in every respect; because it was closed architecture everything ran
just the same. Sounded good so I bought a 64k Apple 2+. Somehow he'd
forgotten to mention it was just CALLED a 64k, it was actually a 48k
processor with a deep in the pits slow clock speed. Of course most of the
ram and memory was on the floppy. HD? Naw, you had to buy a PC if you wanted
a HD. Finding software was a zero sum game too, there just wasn't anything
but word processing, spread sheets and elementary school software and they
were really expensive. Cost me more than 2x than my WAY more powerful PC and
I could get software for the PC. The real pisser was it was less than half
as fast as my Commodore 64 had maybe 10% the storage space, cost something
like 4x as much, not counting software. Software for the Commodore was maybe
10-15% as expensive and there must've been 20x as much. A semi real Cadd
program, celestial ephemeris, games out the wazoo and more. When it came to
the 386-33 there was no comparison, heck, with one little inexpensive bit of
software I could run all my Commodore software. 

Jer
-----Original Message-----
From: theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Peter Fels & Phoebe
Palmer
Sent: Friday, November 1, 2013 3:33 PM
To: Blacksmithing List Sponsored by ABANA
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Removal of Norton

Jerry: i started on Dos 2.5 and a puter that had no HD but 2 floppies. One
floppy and a half of the second held Wordstar  3.? and a spell checker.
I roughly added it up and figured i'd spent well over a year of my waking
life and innumerable $, trying to get MS and PCs to function.
Buying expensive Macs and working at minimum wage for that  wasted time
would have been way cheaper and less frustrating! Admittedly, i was being
cheap, being a poor metal sculptor and that cost me greatly. Buying
discount, bottom of the line PCs was a profound mistake.
I prefer the inherent anarchy of the PC format philosophically. 
But pragmatically, it was a disaster in retrospect.