Dribble Glass Redux (was Re: Upgrade my Vic-20 ?)
The _what_ stops _where?_ (buck@satyr.sylvan.com)
Mon, 15 Dec 97 21:40 PST
Michael M. Butler writes:
> I am guilty of Ted Nelson/Doug Engelbart/Alan Kay/Don Norman think.
>
> Media/machines making humans wait for them to be ready are a bad thing. It might
> be different if booting my K6 with Win95 would automatically trigger hostilities
> or a nuclear exchange somewhere. But waiting minutes every time I boot, pardon my
> French, blows dead donkey d***. How often do you have to reboot your wristwatch,
> for crying out loud?
>
> I calculated that just the absence of that delay would justify my buying a PPilot
> (another, and a very successful, ROM OS gizmo), with a payback time of a few
> months. I was right.
>
> The problem is, the
> red-queen's-race/architecture/compatibility/market/development/complexity/competition
>
> strategies of the big player(s), especially Rocking Horse Boy (aka Billgatus of
> Borg) and his legions, make fullblown ROM OSs very unlikely to catch on any time
> soon, though some embedded systems exist which purport to possess ROM or Flash Win
> xx. Everyone is always d***ing around with some DLL tweak or some such.
>
> Old joke (punchline variation #1):
> "Q.: How did God create the Universe in seven days?
> "A.: He didn't have an installed base."
>
> That is the beauty of the VIC-20 and the PPilot, and to a degree, the BeBox.
>
> It would take a planet-busting asteroid strike to get it to happen in the PC world
> of today.
> TFB, IMHO.
>
> MMB
>
> What has gone before:
>
> David Andaria wrote:
> > hey would a Pentium2-300Mhz be any faster than my Vic-20?
>
>
> I replied:
> >Probably, but it won't run your old cartridge of Omega Race.
>
>
> But Mikael K Karlsson - mkk@tkj.se cut to the heart of the matter:
> >No, the Vic-20 still boots much, much faster.
>
> And then TANKIE wrote:
>
> > Omega Race IS a good game, and having the operating system on ROM is not a bad
> > idea. How hard could it be?
> >
> > I am guilty of Commodore 8 bit mentality....I own a at least 5 VICs and C=64s.
> > I even owned the stock.
>
> --
> (NOTE: Robotlike replies to the above address will fail;
> *noncommercial* communications are welcome; kindly
> substitute a hyphen for the asterisk in the above address.
> Sorry for any inconvenience.)
>