But such is life on the bleeding edge of technology. Like 30 seconds before your 6 hour ray trace finished tracing and would have saved the last bit of the file that would have made it readable. Which means it crashed usually at the most important moments. The operating system was easily as stable as Windows or the Mac’s OS at the time. Because I’d learned the command line commands on CompuServe long before it went GUI. I actually used it to access CompuServe for the longest time. But I had a pre-emptive, multitasking operating system, with a modern graphical user interface (GUI for those that need it.) that I could use to play games, write documents, ray trace, paint, do database stuff, spreadsheet and even use a modem to dial up a BBS. I used 2 x 3.5″ floppies and hadn’t a hope to have the cash to buy a hard drive at the time. This machine had 1 MB of memory, half of that was directly accessible to the graphics chip. I’ll use the Amiga for a moment since I owned one and know it’s internals enough to be able to speak with some authority. It’s just amazing what computers are doing. Intel has the 386 chip out and someone has broken the 640K memory barrier in real mode. Soon the world will rattle with the sounds of 3.5″ 800KB floppy disks being filtered through someone’s fingers like large square poker chips. Hard drives are just swelling to almost 20Megs in size if you want to spend a couple grand and there’s a new media out that people think is so much better than those flimsy 5.25″ disks. Atari has a system that can appeal to the graphic hungry, as does a little company called Commodore with their Amiga. It’s an amazing and exciting time in computers here in 1988. I’m here mostly because I don’t have the answers and I’m hoping that the smarter people out there can give me the answers I seek. I’m not here to pick on an OS in general. Note: This editorial is meant for discussion and rebuttal if any is to be had. It’s totally astounding that they can cram so much onto such a tiny disk. Amazing is the recent interest in full, live, operating systems that can fit on a 50 MB CD-ROM.
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