It really depends on the area, if someone in the neighbourhood is actively taking care of the strays then they’ll be fine, but we have too many strays in Greece and not enough people who care for them unfortunately. Road killing and poison is a pretty big problem in the cities as well…
Some stays in Turkey do very well. However I’ve seen plenty of cats in need of medical attention (swollen limbs, covered in their own feces, etc) and some people actually harassing them. Same in Greece according to my cousin who was doing some charity work on an island to improve cats conditions.
Stray population needs to be small enough for them to do well with the help they can get from people. The best thing that Turks do for cats, is too neuter them.
That’s true, stray population needs to be kept in control. Just hope things get better in the future for the strays, whether in Turkey, Greece or anywhere else.
I like it. Similarly, licensing closed source commercial software is much like leasing or renting. You rely on the vendor to do maintenance, fix issues, and provide support. SaaS is like staying at a hotel.
You can do both though. Lots of high-profile software is both open source and available as SaaS.
The beauty of that strategy is you can ensure the software will survive your service provider going bankrupt or otherwise suddenly disappearing, leaving you without a solution.
By not being locked into a specific vendor, competition will be centered around providing the best service, which is in my opinion exactly as it should be.
The company was called Need to Know, and it was initially in an old Victorian under a freeway overpass in San Francisco.
So I got the computer Friday and ran into this 23 line fail that evening. I called around 8:00 pm, expecting to get an answering machine. Instead I got, " Hey come on over!"
So I drive back to SF and get there around 9:00 pm. Somebody immediately puts a drink in my hand. People are just partying in a low key way. There are computer parts all over the place, but people are just partying.
So one of the guys took my machine apart, diagnosed the CPU failure, and replaced it with parts on hand.
I’m back in Berkeley by maybe 11:00 pm with a fully functional computer.
Here’s where it gets ugly. I did business with them into the late 1980s. During that time , some psycho took on a grudge against them and literally burned their place of business down.
Several places of businesses, burned down sequentially. Fucking tragic.
I lost track of them by 1990. I don’t know if they went further underground or what.
But they gave me a really human intro to computing. I can only hope they are well , wherever they are.
We actually had one of those Macintosh 128 K machines in the lower left. My dad got two external floppy drives for it. The first lesson I remember learning, that I still remember is when the dialog box asks:
I don’t know about the OP, but our first computer was a TRS-80 clone with a tape drive, 16k ram, and stunning 64x16 B&W graphics. Every month dad would drive us to computer club, we’d copy as many games as we could (onto tape), then spend the rest of the month trying to get them to work. Rinse and repeat. It was awesome.
Also typed in basic games from the computer mags which needed lots of debugging. How I learnt to program (before being taught Pascal in high school).
Typing in the games could be both fun and highly frustrating. I had an Apple II and if you fucked up on a line, you probably weren’t going to be able to find it and fix it. There was no debugger and typing LIST would show you the whole thing and you couldn’t scroll up. So if you did it right, it was great. If you messed up somewhere, good luck.
Don’t mind me. Just showing off the Sinclair ZX Spectrum bag I got a couple of weeks ago. I’m nostalgic for 5 minute loading screens that could trigger an epileptic fit!
The 80’s were certainly a different time. Especially when only allowed to access a computer at school for a few minutes in the day (Apple IIe) so all of us could “have a go at the computer in the library”!
I would never have imagined as a kid what it was going to be like today with smartphones and the internet everywhere….
“Only had BBCs”. The best 8-bit computer of their generation? ONLY had a BBC? You have any idea how lucky we were growing up with those amazing machines in the 80s-90s? I owe my whole career to the BBC, with an honorable mention to the ZX Spectrum I had at home.
I guess I went to a well funded public school… In 1984-5 we had a whole bunch of apple ][s so we had an hour or so per week of programming in basic- I had a commodore 64 at home so I could do the classwork in the first 5-10 minutes, then spend the rest of the time playing with it to see what it could do…
I was starting writing here to correct you that it had 48KB (like the spectrums) but thought to check on wikipedia and… you are right! Oh my goodness! 1kb and called a computer! And was a computer!
I do, wonderful machine. You could get a 16K RAM pack (most did) that made a huge difference. Problem is, if an ant sneezed in the next town over it’d wobble loose and the machine would crash. A dab of Blu-Tac was just the ticket.
The ZX Spectrum came out 2 years later and was far more capable, and reasonably priced.
We had an Apple II+, IIe and //c. I would inherit each one when my family upgraded. They were around $1300 each I think. The //c might have been more because it was “portable” (you could put it in a suitcase with a 10-pound battery and a weird tiny horizontal screen that wouldn’t work with most software).
My grandparents had a C-64 which they never used. It basically became mine. I think it was $600.
Owned a //c that was all mine, a birthday gift IIRC. I remember that it had a composite output so you could plug it into a TV to play games on a bigger screen that actually had colour. Loved that thing, including the monochrome (green) monitor that neatly sat on top of it. I would spend hours typing in programs from magazines.
My dad got the Apple ]|[ (3) he even got a whopping external 1 MB HDD for the thing. The HDD was in the same case as the CPU, so it kinda looked like my dad had two computers sitting next to each other with the monitor straddling them
Someone donated one of those to my elementary school, but we had not software for it, just an Apple II emulator that had to be loaded on the floppy drive before loading whatever other software you wanted to run on it. Sort of pointless. I’m not sure why it was donated without software other than an emulator.
Macintosh was always Apple. Apricot may have been trying to ride on the coattails of Apple’s popularity (I remember the computers but I’m too lazy to look it up).
Olivetti, from Italy, was pretty famous in Europe as a typewriter manufacturer. So it wasn't much of a surprise my father's first PC (and the first PC compatible I could use) was Olivetti PCS 386SX, circa 1992.
Turns out Olivetti is surprisingly important in computer history too. Olivetti made Programma 101, which was the first programmable desk computer/calculator, way back in 1965. If NASA bought a bunch of these, I guess it was serious shit.
I just googled the conversion of the price from 1985 to today based on inflation and then googled the exchange rate between the current value in GBP to USD.
A computer with a spreadsheet was a HUGE game changer.
In '85 most companies did books by hand and adding machine. Records were kept in ledgers and in filing cabinets. People used to hire CPA’s to come in and do the balancing even in small convenience stores. Given labor wasn’t what it is now, but a machine like that could pay for itself pretty quickly.
I worked a fast food job in the 90’s They had an ancient box running 1-2-3. Every night, the MOD would have to sit down with a paper sheet and an adding machine to generate this table, then enter all the transformed data into Lotus. They literally sat back there for hours working over the data. I asked, why don’t you just change the sheet to do all the calculations? Can’t, the franchise owner wants it all done by hand. They were literally taking a row of numbers, doing some math on it, then doing more math on each column to come up with a final row of like 7 numbers.
I had them show me what they were doing and wrote a program on my TI calculator to generate the table from the input numbers. Told them if they wanted the program just to get the same calculator and I’d transfer it over.
Nobody trusted computers… they were ‘new’. It wasn’t entirely unheard of for people to verify the output of a computer by hand, or as in your case, doing it by hand intentionally.
When I remember back to the early 80s, me a single digit aged human with my first Commodore 64 and a cassette tape drive, to being a high school aged kid and helping my buddies install their extended memory set chip by chip to get them to 1mb of ram, to way in the future where I type this comment on a mobile phone touch screen capable of unfathomable high resolution graphics and speed is still a surreal feeling.
I grew up and grew old with computers and it’s wild to imagine a life without and a world without them nearly 50 years later.
Never mind computers (my first one, in I think 1985, had two floppy drives and an amber screen, very fancy), it’s phones that blow my mind. I grew up with a heavy black bakelite dial phone that lived on a special bench in the hall, and now I do video calls with my family on the other side of the world from wherever I happen to be. Toll calls used to be a huge deal, you had to call the operator, we didn’t even have direct dialling. I watch TV on my phone, not even Star Trek had that!
So everything is about right. Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.
In 1985 HDD were only starting to gain traction for PC’s and that was about the only thing you could spec up. That IBM pc is “High Res” which probably means it was VGA multicolour (yay!lol) with 640x480 resolution. So you were basically buying top of the line.
Today, if you were to build a top of the line PC, RTX4090, latest best intel cpu, PSU, etc, etc it would be easy to spend $5K!
But damn, the difference in performance from back then to now!! (That IBM is an XT which means it was a 4.77Mhz with 8086 cpu. Just looking at that picture, I can feel the weight of the bloody thing)
I was there too but vga was not. My dad got an IBM XT fully specd as a home computer (he was CFO of Emma EDB). I believe the hires could be EGA or probably Hercules as they don’t brag about colours - but his had CGA. The full spec of my dads pc - that changed my life - was: 2x256kb ram on full length isa cards. 10mb hdd, 360kb floppy. 9pin printer and cga. Total cost back then in Norwegian KR was 120000.
After checking with my dad the price was half of what I stated. He got one for home and one for office - the business he was with was providing IBM mainframes, and wanted to check out the PC. My dad got them because of Lotus 1-2-3 - spreadsheets was the shit in accounting/ finance already
yea 8086 couldn’t drive a vga. 16 preset ugly colors if you’re lucky. unless you had a magical amiga with dedicated graphics chips to do 256 colors, 4096 if you’re nasty.
Sir, I’ll have you know that I had an IBM PS/2 Model 25 with 256 glorious colors in MCGA. And fuck every developer that didn’t support MCGA, because it dropped down to 4 color CGA if not. No support for EGA.
I don’t know about resource intensive, today you need a frigging powerplant to feed a decent PC. At least the 286 and onwards didn’t consume that much right?
Edit: It was not about running costs but the resources to Build them, and that’s true for sure! Sorry!
Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.
For PCs? Maybe not, but you could get plenty of other types of home computer for reasonably cheap. A Commodore 64 was $150 in 1985, for instance. Just had to stay away from the absolute bleeding edge.
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