Top 10 reasons the new WordPress Beep Boop Boob editor is a stunning failure.

ATheoK, those were the days. Remember the no-graphics game installed on Wangs? The dungeon one? You can still play it. And it still recognizes when you swear at it for killing you the umpteenth time. Plus the floppies! Big square things that were truly floppies! And punch card chads. Gawd. Spent an entire week going through a 1000 piece stack of my data flicking off chads. And every screen had a burned in main menu you could see even when the thing was turned off. Portland, Oregon was a hotbed for Wang users. We all swore by them even though the server stacks regularly overheated unless the air conditioning units were aimed directly at the row of stacks. Still, I remember those days so fondly.

Speaking of old stuff, I sent messages via BBS (bulletin board system). A ubiquitous activity on black computer screens with gold font. And I recall it was all capital case in the beginning. Still, it was very popular among young researchers.

I’m convinced that Windows 8 – and to a lesser extent other software “upgrades” – are the root cause of the Western Economies decline in productivity over the last half decade.

“Pamela Gray says: August 17, 2014 at 8:05 pm
ATheoK, those were the days. Remember the no-graphics game installed on Wangs? The dungeon one? You can still play it. And it still recognizes when you swear at it for killing you the umpteenth time. Plus the floppies! Big square things that were truly floppies! And punch card chads. Gawd. Spent an entire week going through a 1000 piece stack of my data flicking off chads. And every screen had a burned in main menu you could see even when the thing was turned off. Portland, Oregon was a hotbed for Wang users. We all swore by them even though the server stacks regularly overheated unless the air conditioning units were aimed directly at the row of stacks. Still, I remember those days so fondly.”

Pamela: The only part I remember fondly was how revered I was as an IT wizard. The Wangs were easy to run. I did cheat though. I’ve used ‘patchit’ a hexadecimal program for ‘correcting’ mistakes on the disk without intervening software, much like Norton’s original NU.
Adventur, (that non graphics game), was kinda fun for slow weekends; though I deleted it when my employees were devoting improper attention to it. IBM’s version is entering a sewer, but almost identical otherwise. It was fun just to throw curses or crazy solutions just to see the responses. That was around the same time we’d type in names or phrases into MS Word to see the ‘suggested correction’; definitely not politically correct suggestions.
IBM’s version was known as ‘advent’ and you can often still find it on mainframes. My understanding is that the original was written on a DEC machine which was popular at many colleges. I first learned antique COBOL on a DEC and punch cards. Later I took FORTRAN on a client to some distant IBM mainframe where we had to
a) write our programs
b) type the programs onto punch cards (that were punched, but not lettered)
c) then if you were wise, run the cards through a card reader to have the program punched lettered in to make them readable.
And it was the proverbial submit the job, come back tomorrow and receive the output along with account metrics for how much of my allotted CPU time was used.
Yeah, terminal 0 always had letters burned in as we always kept that one on all day to watch for messages (machine ones).
I forget how much those dang floppys cost; everything Wang was bloody expensive. I replaced all of the Wang terminals, (except terminal 0 of course) with IBM PCs running emulation software and easily based the ROI justification on paying reduced maintenance fees.
Our 288mb removable drives were something like $35K for the whole machine and $55K if we bought two.
I spent a weekend making a bootable 65mb removable drive for the system. Wangs had a bad habit of multiplying bad drives. When a drive went bad it was a mistake to just pop in a good drive as the drive box would immediately destroy the good removable. It was far cheaper to boot up on the 65mb and find out what was wrong first, clear buffers then install a good 288.
DEC, CP/M, Wang, IBM TSO/CMS, IBM PCs (original two box 8088 with one box holding the add on 10mb hard drive), Compaq clam shell portable, Osborne, Tandy, … It’s a very long list and I considered virtually all of it wonderful fun.
Even today I dabble and try t keep an eye on tech news. When the software beta teams have a lot of very angry beta testers (Win 8) it’s a good possibility that ordinary users will hate it even more upon release.
Apparently the whole Win 8 concept was rammed through by ‘executives’ and ‘marketing’ concept groups that firmly believed people would learn to cope. What the ‘executives’ ignore is that many people actually use the machines for very serious work, not play. Most of the Win 8 design centers on ‘social’ designs ignoring serious work. The MS ‘help’ forums are full of listed problems, most of which receive lip service, including the dreaded and utterly useless ‘reformat and reinstall’ suggestions or are ignored altogether. It seems very few help desk types are willing to tell certain executives just how dumb their approach is.
Excel is such fun under Win 8, (NOT!). Having a touch screen is just a tad easier than always using a mouse; but a mouse is required.
Microsoft was never any good at ‘first’ attempts at anything. Their second attempts were often just usable and it wouldn’t be until their third or later attempts that the software would be ‘good’. Shame they broke that approach with their operating system debacles.