Yeah, this is on those irresponsible companies that...are offering Internet services. Those hussies.

Usagi Electric managed to recover the code from a 1960s era LGP-21.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBjh0SaA5dc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39SwIl3wQDw

The coating wasn't a problem, it was a couple of the heads that sort of failed.

Yeah, I saw that via another forum. You should check out his G-15 restore; it's epic. That LGP-21 looks almost pristine, and based on the back story, they guy who originally had it sounds like the kind of guy who knows how to store vintage kit. That thing didn't come out of a barn someplace, so not surprising the coatings survived. :-)

A classic case of someone projecting out to infinity from just after the first bend of the S curve.

In my experience if they test positive the tech will stop and wipe down the machine before trying again. They're highly prone to false positives.

At this point if Oracle's reputation has any more negative impact it is liable to roll over and suddenly have an amazing reputation.

People used to joke that EMACS was an acronym for "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping", just to give you an idea of how constrained memory was in those days.

Even the computers we think about as the first "PCs", the IBM 5150, shipped with 16 or 64kb of main memory. They were much closer to machines like the Apple II or the Commodore 64 than most people realize.

I supported a bunch of 8 and 16mb sparcstations, but they were a grant from Sun to the university, so no griping.

105 mb disks meant (almost) everything was NFS mounted, and NFS did a great job.

But to your point, with 8 megs, Emacs Makes A Computer Slow.

And there was no budget for upgrades to anything.

People would sneer that you were using shoddy free software, but then the guys who bought the expensive vendor solution would discover that the paid software was also of poor quality and unlike the free version you didn't get the source so your only option for getting something fixed was to file a bug report and pray, despite spending 6 figures on a support contract.

I mean this is the point of having salespeople, to maximize the amount of money you get from each customer.

This is why when I go to the price page for a product and seeing "contact our sales team for a quote" I look for an alternative.

Dell does a soft version of this by setting uncompetitive prices on the website and making you call to get the real price, although ironically that usually just means we go with a different company that simply posts a competitive price.

That's not fair. Sometimes they kill it off quickly.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

The tiniest bit of contamination can get a whole project shut down and the creators heavily fined if the lawyers are aggressive enough. It's not worth the risk to a project like Asahi. Generally the law is going to side with whomever has the most lawyers.

none of this is incorrect, however, how freaking sad is it that in order to get any OS that's not locked down and owned by Apple on the hardware we buy and supposedly own, someone (together with whole open source organizations) has to risk utter financial ruin.

I hate the new system of no ownership and closed everything.