Readit NewsI only became familiar with the later FX-80, which was the same but different. I managed to get logos printed along with neat boxes around information from the extra characters it had in PCL.
I am sure NLQ was a selling point of the FX-80 but I would like to see how good it was on the MX-80. At the time printers from Epson, HP and Canon were miracles of engineering, more advanced than the computers they were connected to.
The key test is not how it looks on screen, but how it looks printed.
A few years later my dad decided to buy an Epson MX-80 for his computer. The daisy-wheel and the plotter at work (he worked at SRI) just didn't cut it, I guess? This required buying a serial card for the S-100. In order to get that printer to work, he had to first, wire up a cable because the data lines from the card were on different pins in the printer. I believe there was a version of the MX-80 that came with a serial port instead of a parallel port which made some things easier. I was recruited as his assistant. Then he had to modify and recompile the BIOS. Then he had to also make some changes to CP/M. This was a process of trial and error that lasted for weeks. I remember I was away at summer camp and he sent me a letter he printed out on that printer. He was so happy that he finally got it to work.
Anyways, this resurfaced that memory and I thought I might as well share it. I still have the printout he sent me somewhere.
Condos should be a lot more popular, especially for the young and old, but the fees are pretty much always ridiculous. The whole point is to spread out the maintence costs among many residents so they are trivial, instead condo fees are usually in the hundreds or thousands per month per unit for no apparent reason other than the landlord wants a big payday. It doesn’t cost millions per year to maintain some parking spots, a small unstaffed pool, a front desk, and building maintenance. It’s like paying rent on top of your mortgage.
Personally I think I'd rather rent than get a condo.
XP/Window 7 were peak end-user OS's, once you got over the Fisher-Price look of XP.
The constraints you had in terms of user-UI were a massive advantage in terms of user-understanding. Now we're in a stupid era of the browser is the UI and everything is non-conformant with everything else in terms of looks/expectation/behaviour.
The version of MS-Office prior to the stupid ribbon-shit were also the peak versions. It's all been downhill since then with Windows ME and Windows 8 being exceptionally low points.
I'm about to shift to FreeBSD as my main driver as the Linux distribution fragmentation and wane in reliability/dependability and repeatability has given me the shits (how many apt-get equivalents are there now...?) I used to like Debian back in the day but now it and its derivatives (e.g. Ubuntu) give me the shits and Red-Hat and Fedora likewise, and Debian itself won't even install a working desktop. Apparently raising a bug for Fedora gets put into "Closed - not a bug" because IBM don't give a shit about quality anymore - even though the install resulted in an unbootable OS and I spent hours raising a proper bug report. Pop-OS was reasonable, but scaling where some apps have both big and little font sizes intermixed still mean its a clusterfuck of a kludge.
It's 2025 and apparently trying to mount network shares in fstab before the network interface is up isn't a bug. It's still not year of the desktop for Linux.
FWIW, I liked Apple in the 1980's - not so much since then.
I still appreciate all the contributions of those individuals out there is both GNU/Linux and the BSD'd trying to make the world a better place for themselves/others and sharing the results.
At that point I had a choice. I could buy a new version of Windows 11 for $200 which is much worse than the Windows 7 I gave up. Or I could switch to Linux. Hello Linux! There's one application I miss dearly that was Windows-only, but overall I'm a happy camper now.
This is a misconception that bugs me. The problem isn't that the Earth isn't fixed in space, it's that there's no such thing as a fixed point in space. Position is only defined relative to other objects. If you're going to use time travel in a story or something then it has to use something like an anchor object to determine destination. I.e. the relative location of the traveler and the anchor is replicated from the future to the past.