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Anyone who is even vaguely interested in the late 70s/early 80s personal computer revolution, should watch a series from AMC called "Halt and Catch Fire."  It starred one of my favorite actors, Lee Pace, and it was just really well done IMO.   It was strongly nostalgic to me for some obvious reasons.

Anyone who is even vaguely interested in the late 70s/early 80s personal computer revolution, should watch a series from AMC called "Halt and Catch Fire."  It starred one of my favorite actors, Lee Pace, and it was just really well done IMO.  It was strongly nostalgic to me for some obvious reasons.

I watched it when it was on.  Highly enjoyable.  Its setting really pre-dates my computer awareness since I believe the show starts set in either the late 70's or very early 80's and I didn't know anything about computers until at least 1987, and even then, I knew nothing technical.  Other than I learned some DOS commands, I guess.  That's not really technical....that's just having to learn how to boot up my games and stupid word processor to do my homework. 

Nevertheless, it was nostalgic for me too, and I couldn't exactly tell you why.  Maybe just anything about the 80's.  But it did reference a few major things here and there I would've been aware of in the computer world, even as young and clueless as I was. 

Also........screw Donna.  I can't even remember what she did in s4, but the way she treated Bos was crap, and I haven't forgiven her for it. 

I started loading my old laptops with Linux years ago, but I'm not really a cool geek.  The distros of at least the last 15 years (the time span that I first messed with Linux) are very visually similar to the Windows GUI and everything seems kinda dumbed down and automatically "easy," even for somebody like me who had never been on a Linux OS before.  I never know how to do do something on Linux, but yet I'm almost always right on the first guess for where to find something. 

I never got into the command line stuff and don't know any Linux commands.  Never use the command line, tbh. 

Yeah, Linux is a LOT easier to use than it was 20 years ago. Honestly in many ways it can be the type of thing that if you want someone to have a PC that's largely just a dumb terminal / web browser, I'd rather set up a Linux system than Windows because they don't know enough to screw it up, and there's not a large group out there trying to write Linux viruses. It's like a Chromebook, but completely open and not locked into the Google world.  

I recall that when I moved from SoCal to Atlanta in 2005, I embarked on a project to get deeper into Linux as a learning experience. So I repurposed a desktop tower PC that I had, using a TV capture card and a graphics card, and built my own DVR based upon the MythTV software that ran on top of Linux at the time. 

It was all pretty cool and not that hard--except that Linux didn't have a built-in driver for the ATi graphics card so I had to compile them myself from source. Made things harder than they needed to be, but it worked!

The cool thing about having an open-source DVR is that all the things that will piss off content providers if you are a cable/satellite/streaming service if you build them into your DVR software, are now completely available. The MythTV DVR software itself once a recording was complete would go in and analyze the recording to find the commercials and just cut them right out of the file. So you didn't even have to skip or fast forward through commercials. They were just--poof!--gone. 

But now Linux is pretty simple to do most everything using the GUI. But if you know how to get under the hood with command line, you get WAY more control than that. 

What I recall from my elementary school years--and how I still think about it--is that the "compatible" in IBM-compatible meant that my friends with IBM-Cs could run their games on my IBM-C and vice versa.  Whereas my friends with Commodore 64's could not boot their games over at the houses of us kids with IBM-Cs, and vice versa. 

That was a source of consternation for me, because I thought the Commodore 64 had way cooler games, and I wanted one, and I was so pissed when we finally got a computer one day and my dad had come home with an IBM-compatible.  It was because a guy he worked with was a techie for his time, and he told my dad the Commodore 64 was basically junk, and he recommended something that could run WordPerfect and some other stuff I didn't care about. 

I wanted the games, dammit. 

But I did learn DOS on that old Vendex, which I was proud of until Windows hid DOS from the minds of the public and eventually did not run on top of DOS at all, so nobody cared about my cool DOS skills anymore. 

I still maintain Microsoft propagated Windows so hard to make everybody forget about DOS 6.0, which as far as I could tell was basically a virus Microsoft decided to release under the guise of "operating system."

I had a C64, in fact I still have it. I got it about 1985 or ‘86. Great little computer. Load *.*, 8,1 
DOS was cool way back when. Still freaks some younger ppl out when I go to the command line for something vague. 
Used to be a fun one. Netsend in the command line, then they’re username, then the message. We did one one time that said all data will be deleted. Press enter. We could hear the cussing across the room. 

I didn't really like the time jump, not sure what season that was.  But I got used to it, and still enjoyed it up to the end.

Linux guys just think they're the rock stars of the UNIX world.  They sniff their own farts.  Screw 'em!

I thought Linux was a separate language from UNIX.  

Yeah, Linux is a LOT easier to use than it was 20 years ago. Honestly in many ways it can be the type of thing that if you want someone to have a PC that's largely just a dumb terminal / web browser, I'd rather set up a Linux system than Windows because they don't know enough to screw it up, and there's not a large group out there trying to write Linux viruses. It's like a Chromebook, but completely open and not locked into the Google world. 


But now Linux is pretty simple to do most everything using the GUI. But if you know how to get under the hood with command line, you get WAY more control than that.

Yeah, and it's real lightweight too, which is why I stick it on my old PC's once the hardware is obsolete.  I've had trouble with Linux natively recognizing the touchpad on Dell laptops, but it's gotten easier and easier over the years to load the driver.  I want to say the last time I installed it, it recognized the problem and offered to get the driver for me.  It's been a couple years, I might be misremembering.  I like the Mint distro.  Ubuntu is probably the "flagship"--if Linux has such a thing--and I hear it can do more stuff, but I think Mint is the easiest for somebody coming from the Windows world, so it's mostly what I've used.  It also has native apps that I really enjoy.  Rhythmbox, for example, is a fantastic music manager for my tastes.  It's everything iTunes used to be before Apple lost its damn mind in 2011 starting with iTunes version 11.  I despise iTunes now as a music manager, but Rhythmbox on Linux?  Wonderful.  

I wouldn't mind learning Linux, I'm just not motivated to do it.  There's no work benefit for me, and I've never come across something in personal use that made me wish I knew how to utilize the command line.  Maybe if I knew more about what's possible I'd be more interested.  I pretty much stay away from it unless I'm trying to fix some little issue and I've looked up how to do something.  

I have to use the command prompt in Windows sometimes for Python stuff, for work and when I was in school.  But I mostly don't use that either.  

When I gather the money, I want to build a new desktop with 4 hard drive spaces.  I don't like dual-boot, partitioned-drive setups because I've found it causes some glitches on the Windows side.  I'm gonna install Windows on one drive, Linux on another, and my files will be located on a third so I don't have to reload everything every few years when a Linux distro stops being supported and I have to install a new version.  I'll leave the 4th blank, but eventually I'd aim to make myself a Hackintosh.  For as much as I dislike Macs, it does have music software I like that is simply not available on any other platform.