[arachne] Re: Users and Wizards

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Greg Mayman schreef:

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:31:34 -0500 (EST), ewalt@xxxxxxxx wrote:


My son is a freshly minted electrical engineer who's been hired by a
major computer manufacturer to write firmware for their line of
servers. He's told me that few of his engineering friends will use
Windows unless they have to and most do not use Linux. Macs are the
computer of choice for personal use. I've tried to get him interested
in taking a look at Arachne since he will be working in C, but he thinks
that the idea of anyone still using DOS is "quaint". He doesn't understand
why anyone would try to run something in 640k when most likely they
have dozens if not hundreds of megs of RAM available.


And he has an excellent point there!

Are we just on a nostalgia trip? No, I don't think so.

I have two computers, both probably well past their "use by" dates. Both
are P1-133s. One is running MS-DOS 6.22, with 16 megs of RAM; the other
is running Windows 98SE with 64 megs of RAM for the stuff that DOS or
DOS applications can't do.

Both connect to my phone line with 56k modems.

But the one with MS-DOS 622 (and Arachne) is (a) faster to boot (b)
faster to login and establish a connection to the internet (c) faster to
download and display plain text files (d) faster to download non-text
files.

Guess which is the computer of my choice?

I realize that a new computer running at a warp factor of 7 or higher,
with gigabytes of RAM and whatever, would probably allow me to do these
things even faster than the DOS computer can do them now.
It takes over 6 minutes to boot, connect and have "Thunderbird" for e-mail up and running on this machine with windows XP.
On another machine, 3 times slower, Arachne is ready to download the e-mail within a minute.
In this case the 'fast' hardware does not overcome the dificiencies of the software... the newer hardware is more and more obstructing the use of Arachne. No COM or printerports, USB, ... router/modems with build-in javascript, windows-only printers, etc, etc, The software (XP) does not allow running Arachne either, nor has pure DOS facilities :-( :-( 

Regards, Bastiaan




But it seems to me to be somehow wrong to have to use faster and
"heavier" hardware to overcome the deficiencies of the software.


   ,-./\
  /     \ From Greg Mayman, in beautiful Adelaide, South Australia
  \_,-*_/   "Queen City of The South"  35d 01'44"S  138d 32'13"E
       v
Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --
Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

Other related posts: