As my regular readers know I have 5 or 6 lives and one of them is as a computer technician. I started out writing poetry for machines and some of my earliest training is in COBOL on Hollerith Cards. My favorite set of tools a ‘C’ compiler with good symbolic debugging.
But there’s no money in that anymore and I got trapped in the world of hardware, building and fixing machines which there is also no money in anymore when you can buy a disposable piece of junk for $400.
For some people that’s just a month’s phone bill.
But you can get acceptable results just from assembling the piles of parts people accumulate and the resulting systems were quite wizzy bang in their time and you only have to use one quasi reliable but very common OS- Windows XP.
I don’t recommend running it in an environment of less than 256 Mb or a 450 Mhz + processor, but there’s a ton of non-dual core tech that works just fine for the usual things.
What are those?
I use Office ’97. What else do I need?
If I’m doing a really professional presentation I use Pagemaker 6.5.
I use Firefox 1.5.0.12. It still works, why fix it?
These all work just fine in that environment, the limitations are your memory (sometimes less than 768 Mb) and your bandwidth. Sometimes they will only handle 60 Gb hard drives without BIOS fixes and run at the slower 33 and 66 ATA rates.
Of course my own problems fascinate me more than most and I’m still dealing with massive load time fail with Yahoo News and the kona29.kontera.com element.
My current line of attack on that may seem a little round Robin Hood’s Barn, but it serves several goals.
I have some drive space for an install of Ubuntu. Ubuntu comes with a more up to date version of Firefox and has some organizational tools that would be helpful in producing the content. Ubuntu is stable and virus free and has some good cross OS scans available which I could use on my own system and my nephew’s (pretty surely virused, and a laptop to boot).
So I look at this as kind of an information exchange.
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