• Screaming Into The Void

    From MIKE POWELL@21:4/134 to NBLADE on Thu Jan 1 09:48:00 2026
    ³ Thanks I hope to enjoy it. It certainly brings back memories of when I got my ³ first PC.
    ³ Hell the funny thing is I can still tell you the stats for my first PC (but not
    ³ any machines
    ³ after that).
    ÀÄ[N=>DW]

    LOL, I think I can also.

    8088-XT clone with 640k RAM, a 5.25 floppy, and a 20MB HD, running MS-DOS
    3.3. CGA color graphics.

    The second was a 386 DX 40 with 1 MB RAM (which I immediately upgraded to
    4MB), a 120MB HD, 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives, running MS-DOS 5.0. I very shortly after added Desqview to it. I don't remember if it had VGA or
    SVGA, though. ;)

    ##Mmr 2.61á. !link N 12-31-25 8:35
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  • From nblade@21:1/164 to MIKE POWELL on Fri Jan 2 09:44:00 2026
    Wow, DESQview. Now that is something I haven't heard in a long time. It was interesting times when that stuff was out. I remember using a Windows 3.1
    with a PC Tools desktop replacement that had features that were way ahead of it's time (Virtual Desktops), the ability to have folders on the desktop,
    hell the ability to have a folder that had a filter of files in a directory
    (so you could point it to say c:\files with a filter of *.txt and only get
    text files), and a bunch of other things included. I still say that desktop
    was better than what showed up when Win95 came out, and it was running on
    top of Windows 3.1 go figure.

    MIKE POWELL wrote to NBLADE <=-


    The second was a 386 DX 40 with 1 MB RAM (which I immediately upgraded
    to 4MB), a 120MB HD, 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives, running MS-DOS 5.0. I very shortly after added Desqview to it. I don't remember if it had
    VGA or SVGA, though. ;)


    ... Computer Hacker wanted. Must have own axe.
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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to poindexter FORTRAN on Fri Jan 2 12:56:07 2026
    Re: Re: Screaming Into The Void
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to nblade on Fri Jan 02 2026 12:18 pm

    Norton Desktop was a nice one, too - I remember a couple of guys using that at work. IBM had promised a workplace shell for Windows, giving it the object-oriented UI of OS/2, but I never saw it in the wild.

    That would have been interesting from IBM. I feel like IBM could have promoted OS/2 better overall.. It felt like a more robust OS than Windows, and I think it would have been good to see it be more popular and continue to be improved over time.

    These days though, I feel like it's good to have open-source OS options like Linux. I've considered switching entirely to Linux, but the thing that keeps me using Windows on my main PC is the software library. Part of that is I like PC games sometimes, and it seems to me it's still easiest on Windows. I've heard gaming support has improved quite a bit on Linux, but there are more steps you need to go through to get games working. I think there are still some games that don't really work well (or not at all) on Linux that I play, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.

    Overall I don't really have many problems with Windows (despite a lot of people complaining about Windows). I think the only thing that bugs me sometimes is that I normally like to have my desktop wallpaper set to be a slideshow, and sometimes Windows automatically changes it back to a single photo, and I haven't quite figured out why that happens yet. But I suspect it might have something to do with power saving (I haven't looked into that deeply yet).

    Currently, I have Linux on my BBS PC, and on my main PC, I dual-boot Windows and Linux. I'm in Windows on my main PC most of the time though.

    Also, I'm still curious to see how Haiku OS develops. I had tried BeOS for a bit in 1998, and I thought it was a nice OS. But these days, I'm not holding out any hope that Haiku will gain much traction (at least, not any time soon).

    Nightfox
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  • From Mortar M.@21:2/101 to nblade on Fri Jan 2 15:33:10 2026
    Re: Screaming Into The Void
    By: nblade to MIKE POWELL on Fri Jan 02 2026 09:44:00

    Wow, DESQview. Now that is something I haven't heard in a long time.

    I had the DOS version, great program. I tried to get my workplace to use it, but they didn't see the need. Oddly enough, they did go for getting Borland's Sidekick, a TSR suite of utilitys like a notepad, calendar, etc. It used a windowing format like Desqview.
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  • From MIKE POWELL@21:4/134 to NBLADE on Sat Jan 3 08:17:00 2026
    Wow, DESQview. Now that is something I haven't heard in a long time. It was interesting times when that stuff was out. I remember using a Windows 3.1 with a PC Tools desktop replacement that had features that were way ahead of it's time (Virtual Desktops), the ability to have folders on the desktop, hell the ability to have a folder that had a filter of files in a directory (so you could point it to say c:\files with a filter of *.txt and only get text files), and a bunch of other things included. I still say that desktop was better than what showed up when Win95 came out, and it was running on
    top of Windows 3.1 go figure.

    There were a few products out back in Win 3.x days that, from the opinions expressed in BBS Land in the past, were better than what MS came up for
    with Win95. OT1H, if they had made Win95 look too much like one of those products, they probably would have been accused of copying them. OTOH,
    that never stopped them with other things. ;)

    DV was popular at that time (c1990 or 91) so that is why I gravitated
    towards it. There were not many/any Windows BBS packages back then, at
    least not in use in my area.
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  • From MIKE POWELL@21:4/134 to NIGHTFOX on Sat Jan 3 08:40:00 2026
    Some companies already give employees the option to work 4 10-hour days or 5 8-hour days. If it's going to be 4 10-hour days, I'd rather things just be left as it is and give people the option. But if it's 5 8-hour days, I wouldn't mind that for more work-life balance.

    Me also. I was glad that people had the flexibility of 4-10's but I
    didn't want to work that schedule. Going in at 6:45, I felt like I had
    more time in the afternoons to do things at home working 5 days vs.
    working 4 10-hour ones.

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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to poindexter FORTRAN on Sun Jan 4 11:47:35 2026
    Re: Re: Screaming Into The Void
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Sun Jan 04 2026 10:40 am

    I liked the UI of the Windows phone, CE felt too much like they wanted the Windows desktop OS on everything, but WP felt optimized for phones. I was surprised Microsoft didn't make WP work better in Microsoft corporate environments (or more accurately, break performance with every other platform) to make WP the choice for corporate clients.

    Even though a lot of companies traditionally seem to use Microsoft stuff (especially large companies), I've noticed some companies seem to prefer Apple stuff. I briefly worked on a contract with eBay for their Portland, OR location -It was remote at the time (due to COVID), but they said most people working there were using Mac laptops (they gave us a choice to use a Windows or Mac laptop). I chose a Windows laptop because that's what I'm used to, but when it came to asking others for help with tasks, most people were giving me Mac-based solutions..

    In 2010, I worked for another company where most of the devs there used Macs as well. To me it seemed odd, since most of my software developer jobs have been at places where most people used Windows machines, but I've heard Macs are popular for dev work as well. Maybe Windows machines are mainly popular for places that develop Windows software and use Visual Studio & such, and companies that just tend to choose Microsoft products by default.

    Nightfox
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  • From Vorlon@21:1/195 to Nightfox on Mon Jan 5 09:47:40 2026

    Hello Nightfox!

    04 Jan 26 09:44, you wrote to Mortar M.:

    Zune was a MS brand of portable media players, so is out of
    context here. A better comparison would be Windows Phone, which
    also flopped.

    Yeah, I was trying to think of what that Microsoft phone was; I wasn't sure if it was Windows Phone or if Zune also applied to their line of phones.



    From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune

    Zune was a brand of digital media products and services that was marketed by Microsoft from November 2006 until it was discontinued
    in June 2012. Zune consisted of a line of portable media players, a music subscription service known as Zune Music Pass plus Zune
    Marketplace for music, TV and movies, streaming services for the Xbox 360 game console, and the Zune software media player for
    Windows PC's which also acted as desktop sync software for Windows Phone.




    Vorlon


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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to Vorlon on Mon Jan 5 08:43:09 2026
    Re: Screaming Into The Void
    By: Vorlon to Nightfox on Mon Jan 05 2026 09:47 am

    Zune was a MS brand of portable media players, so is out of context
    here. A better comparison would be Windows Phone, which also flopped.

    Yeah, I was trying to think of what that Microsoft phone was; I wasn't
    sure if it was Windows Phone or if Zune also applied to their line of
    phones.

    From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune

    Zune was a brand of digital media products and services that was marketed

    Yes, I remember Zune..

    Nightfox
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  • From Adept@21:2/108 to poindexter FORTRAN on Tue Jan 6 17:39:48 2026
    You're tempting me to go back to Eudora on the BBS, I don't need HTML
    email and prefer mbox formatted email. Last time I tried, there was an
    issue with SMTP ports, I think. I'll need to try again.

    Oh, there is -- you have to use stunnel, and then not use any security that's built into Eudora.

    Which is how it should be, because, obviously, one should not trust a program with no updates in the last two decades to do well with security.

    Which is why I still keep a parallel port cable, in case I'm teleported
    back in time to 1990. :)

    And, hey, never know if the zombie apocalypse comes, and that's the bit of tech that people can usefully make work.

    Mind you, even _if_ there's a zombie apocalypse I can't imagine it mattering.

    Still, just in case...

    (Obviously, _way_ more likely that there's some retro computing reason, where some data is on some old bit of hardware.)

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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Adept on Sat Jan 10 11:01:01 2026
    Adept wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Which is how it should be, because, obviously, one should not trust a program with no updates in the last two decades to do well with
    security.

    Of course, totally agree. I don't run POP3 outside of my firewall, and
    not interpreting HTML helps keep things secure. Securer?

    I did a lot with Eudora in the '90s. I worked at a Mac shop that ran a
    LAN-based email system called "QuickMail" that needed 5 systems to
    support 70 people - one was a usenet gateway, one a Compuserve gateway,
    one for supporting mail clients and a dedicated SMTP gateway.

    I built a BSD/OS box on a 486 desktop, set up Sendmail, Qpopper and
    Eudora clients. We found a Quickmail to mbox converter so we could
    convert email. Then, we created a company address book and pointed
    everyone's eudora.ini file to it.

    Later, we set up a company NNTP server, which hosted departmental
    groups, product groups, and one called "gossip" that ended up taking
    the whole thing down. :)



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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to nblade on Fri Jan 2 10:54:20 2026
    Re: Screaming Into The Void
    By: nblade to MIKE POWELL on Fri Jan 02 2026 09:44 am

    Wow, DESQview. Now that is something I haven't heard in a long time. It was interesting times when that stuff was out. I remember using a Windows 3.1 with a PC Tools desktop replacement that had features that were way ahead of it's time (Virtual Desktops), the ability to have folders on the desktop, hell the ability to have a folder that had a filter of files in a directory (so you could point it to say c:\files with a filter of *.txt and only get text files), and a bunch of other things included. I still say that desktop was better than what showed up when Win95 came out, and it was running on top of Windows 3.1 go figure.

    That's cool. I didn't know PC Tools made a desktop replacement for Windows 3.1.. When I used Windows 3.1, there were one or two desktop enhancements I remember using - I don't remember which it was, but I remember something where one of the features was displaying the time in the top border of any application, which I thought was useful (Windows 3.1 didn't have a bottom taskbar to show the time).

    I still like desktop enhancements like that when I can find them.

    Nightfox
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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to nblade on Fri Jan 2 12:18:12 2026
    nblade wrote to MIKE POWELL <=-

    Windows 3.1 with a PC Tools desktop replacement that had features that were way ahead of it's time (Virtual Desktops), the ability to have folders on the desktop, hell the ability to have a folder that had a filter of files in a directory (so you could point it to say c:\files
    with a filter of *.txt and only get text files), and a bunch of other things included. I still say that desktop was better than what showed
    up when Win95 came out, and it was running on top of Windows 3.1 go figure.

    Norton Desktop was a nice one, too - I remember a couple of guys using
    that at work. IBM had promised a workplace shell for Windows, giving it
    the object-oriented UI of OS/2, but I never saw it in the wild.



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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to MIKE POWELL on Fri Jan 2 12:18:12 2026
    MIKE POWELL wrote to NBLADE <=-

    8088-XT clone with 640k RAM, a 5.25 floppy, and a 20MB HD, running
    MS-DOS 3.3. CGA color graphics.

    DTK XT clone. I put an NEC V20 chip in it. Seagate ST225 20MB drive.
    Hercules graphics, green 12" monitor. MS-DOS 3.3.

    I bought it used, the seller included a full HD of software - Word for
    DOS, Word Perfect, Wordstar, old 1-2-3, AutoCAD, and more.

    I used it to compile code with Microsoft Quick C for classes. It was
    certainly fast enough for the code I was writing...



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  • From Tiny@21:1/700 to Nightfox on Sat Jan 3 07:26:40 2026
    Hi Nightfox,
    In a message to Nblade you wrote:

    That's cool. I didn't know PC Tools made a desktop replacement for
    Windows 3.1.. When I used Windows 3.1, there were one or two desktop enhancements I remember using - I don't remember which it was, but I remember something where one of the features was displaying the time
    in the top border of any application, which I thought was useful
    (Windows 3.1 didn't have a bottom taskbar to show the time).

    I'm using norton desktop on this win 3.1 now. Back in the day I ran
    one that had many more features and looked amazing. I can't rememebr
    the name of it and I've spent far too much time looking. LOL

    I had kept the paper registration code for it but around 2006 I lost
    a lot of things to black mold from a rental house I was in.

    ... I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise.


    * SeM. 2.26 * Dirty Ole' Town
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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Tiny on Sat Jan 3 09:05:14 2026
    Tiny wrote to Nightfox <=-

    I had kept the paper registration code for it but around 2006 I lost
    a lot of things to black mold from a rental house I was in.

    I copied all of my license keys into a OneNote page, I can tell how
    much of a hoarder I am by the keys I still keep around.

    Allaire Homesite, Photoshop 4, Blue Wave, Eudora Pro, Filemaker,Office
    2003, Telix...

    And, WHY did I keep Microsoft Vista license keys?




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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to Adept on Sat Jan 3 09:53:54 2026
    Re: Re: Screaming Into The Void
    By: Adept to Nightfox on Sat Jan 03 2026 09:07 am

    I feel as though I've been having way more issues with bugs than I used to, with Windows.

    Though the truly awful things are, e.g., how a Microsoft account is now mandatory in a variety of situations, the inclusion of a variety of genAI and questionable online features, and the increasing suspicion that Microsoft wants me as a product, not a customer, regardless of how much I paid for the OS.

    So I've been considering Linux more.

    Yeah, in recent years, I've been hearing that Microsoft's main source of revenue isn't Windows anymore, but rather, online services such as Azure, Office 365, and such; thus, Windows may be taking a back seat and might have lower priority for Microsoft these days.

    From a business perspective, that might have actually been a good decision for Microsoft, with a lot more people using mobile devices these days, which tend to be Android or iOS (Microsoft tried to get in the mobile game with their Zune, for instance, which flopped). But they may be leaving Windows users with a low-quality OS now. I've been wondering if there may be a tipping point which would prompt a lot of software companies to make Linux their primary focus instead of Windows. I think there are still a lot of desktop PC users who will need a good OS.

    I've been seriously considering switching to Linux too. My current favorite distribution is Linux Mint.. I dual-boot my main PC with Windows & Linux Mint, and I've also been running Linux Mint exclusively on my 2nd PC for the last 10 years, which hosts my BBS and is also where I run a media server. For a while, I was running my BBS in a Windows VM on that PC, but a few years ago, I moved my BBS to Linux so I don't need to run a VM on that PC. Overall, I think it's working great. And I can't say I've had any significant issues with Linux Mint, including upgrading to new major versions of the OS.

    Nightfox
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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to Mortar M. on Sun Jan 4 09:44:48 2026
    Re: Re: Screaming Into The Void
    By: Mortar M. to Nightfox on Sat Jan 03 2026 10:08 pm

    ...with a lot more people using mobile devices these days, which tend to be
    Android or iOS (Microsoft tried to get in the mobile game with their Zune,
    for instance, which flopped).

    Zune was a MS brand of portable media players, so is out of context here. A better comparison would be Windows Phone, which also flopped.

    Yeah, I was trying to think of what that Microsoft phone was; I wasn't sure if it was Windows Phone or if Zune also applied to their line of phones.

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.34-Linux
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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Adept on Sun Jan 4 09:41:22 2026
    Adept wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Mind you, at some point I switched over to one I found on the Internet. But Eudora is still functional, and its mailboxes are in plain text, so much less a worry about things disappearing.

    You're tempting me to go back to Eudora on the BBS, I don't need HTML
    email and prefer mbox formatted email. Last time I tried, there was an
    issue with SMTP ports, I think. I'll need to try again.

    Though, realistically, probably best if it's in a list of outdated
    things you'd never consider using. But, hey, maybe, just maybe,
    there'll be a time when it's helpful.

    Which is why I still keep a parallel port cable, in case I'm teleported
    back in time to 1990. :)



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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Nightfox on Sun Jan 4 10:40:46 2026
    Re: Re: Screaming Into The Void
    By: Nightfox to Mortar M. on Sun Jan 04 2026 09:44 am

    Yeah, I was trying to think of what that Microsoft phone was; I wasn't sure if it was Windows Phone or if Zune also applied to their line of phones.

    There's an alternate universe where Bill Gates' biggest triumph was the release of the zPhone.

    I liked the UI of the Windows phone, CE felt too much like they wanted the Windows desktop OS on everything, but WP felt optimized for phones. I was surprised Microsoft didn't make WP work better in Microsoft corporate environments (or more accurately, break performance with every other platform) to make WP the choice for corporate clients.
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