i await the day when such a device has a single usb socket to power and connect it and contains not just an sd card reader but the hardware to emulate the computer itself and still fit on a keyring. plug it into a hub/dock with a keyboard mouse and display and the entire computer is ready to go. :-)

The web browsers he recommends are 100% useless for the modern web. I just got a MacBook that won't update past 2020 and I can tell you, 4 year old web browsers are dead, never mind 10 year old ones o_O

Do any of his instructions fix all the TLS updates that break old software?

Surely there must be someone compiling a modern browser for XP?

BASIC on the early 8, and more generally 16 bit machines was quite a bit more empowering than pop media tends to speak to.

My uncle Bob (seriously, I have the generic uncle "Bob"), developed real estate contracts using a combination of C64 BASIC and some word processor that allowed for conditional and parametric document assembly, almost Word Perfect style!

He built up quite a business with those efforts!

A bit later a friend wrote an entire trucking business on the PC running GWBASIC.

I myself started out on a beat up Atari 400 with the Atari BASIC cartridge and the cassette storage peripheral I struggle to recall the name of right now.... 410! That was it.

I wrote TV test and alignment programs. Learned all that working at a TV repair shop as a kid. The Atari had just a couple capabilities that made a huge difference too!

One of those was at least 8 grey shades. I know GTIA could deliver 16 and I ended up using them once I made enough to get a newer 800 XL machine.

Another feature was full overscan graphics. 48 bytes per line instead of 40. That made it possible to draw the full frame patterns and properly identify the safe area for viewers wanting the factory setup, and expand viewing for others without showing blank non raster regions on their screen.

Side bar:

Older sets would often under scan by quite a bit! Correcting that often meant a lot to those viewers.

End Side bar

Another feature was enough colors to calibrate a TV for good color more than close enough. I could get purity tests, set color delay phase and some other items pretty well!

Last feature was 320 pixels in the safe area NTSC. That is two pixels per color clock cycle. When set to monochrome, those pixels were just right for focus, convergence, linearity and the whole test pattern.

All this was some percent off the pro gear, but I found out most people do not care. And I mostly didn't either.

As a famous YouTube I love says, "Good enough for the girls I go out with" (AvE)

BASIC with a few PEEK and POKE commands and the occasional bit of machine language was enough to do a lot!

COMPUTE! Published a nice assembler and disassembler too. For some work, a guy could get setup well enough to produce good programs.

Getting back to XP...

I wrote the above for perspective. Of course XP can make sense. So can DOS, an Amiga, and Windows 3.11, just ask Southwest airlines.

Fact is many of us here can probably work magic with whatever gets put into our hands. I can.

And all these skills couple with microcontrollers too.

Perhaps that warrants discussion here too one day. The skills are a great match and when one can build hardware feature matched to the use case?

Boom goes the Dynamite!

Actually, this guide is not bad really. Well written. There are few questionable things like installing some specific software that can be skipped. Also, Firewall is a must. Even if you harden your XP, there are still few ports left open like 135 and 445. They seem to be inactive (wrapper?) when you disable services and uninstall Microsoft Networking, but I would not trust that. Also, antivirus is useless indeed. Better solution is sandboxing or even VM.

I use Win2003 daily on more powerfull PC (i5-2400, 16GB RAM) and its indeed blazing fast. When cache is warm, everything starts pretty much instantly, so SSD is not really needed. Cache FTW!

It was a small niche business which leased a complete turnkey solution to new home construction sales offices. You'd find these in new growth areas where home builders have bought a large land parcel to create a new development by building a couple hundred suburban homes (as well as the local streets, parks, etc). Basically, they'd first clear the land and complete four or five homes to show as models of each floor plan. They'd usually turn the garage of one of the models into an onsite sales office which would be staffed by an employee realtor who could discuss all the various options (flooring, paint), lot selection and write up a sales contract. These little makeshift sales offices would operate for 3 or 4 years until the development was sold out, at which time the models would be converted into the last homes sold and the builder would start a new development elsewhere.

The company was started by a former realtor who'd spent his career in new construction residential sales and knew the biz inside out. New construction residential sales has distinct needs different from residential resales. So he wrote a software program in BASIC on a Radio Shack Color Computer to do exactly what a new construction sales person needs to do. This involves calculating the financing options including the down payment, monthly payments, taxes and insurance for all the various loan options available, like 30-yr fixed, 15-yr adjustable rate and then sending prospective buyers home with a customized printout showing their options based on their particulars including down payment, rate, credit score, etc.

It was really quite complex under the hood, yet it made all this easy for a sales agent to present clearly to even novice home buyers. It turns out that doing this is well is key to selling the builder's growing inventory of homes and, obviously, there's a lot of money tied up in such a development. However, new home construction companies aren't IT savvy and the vast majority of realtors (especially circa 1980) had never even seen a computer in person before. So, this guy burned his custom BASIC program into auto-booting EPROM cartridges and offered a complete solution for a monthly lease (including installation, training, service and support). Since these Radio Shack computers where just a few hundred dollars and his system was extremely valuable to such construction companies, his little garage business grew like wildfire. I think I was the third or fourth employee he hired and we were still working out of his house. Eventually, the software became so complex that it wouldn't fit in a ROM cartridge anymore (even after I wrote a pretty neat assembly language program that patched ROM bank switching commands into the computer's BASIC allowing the programs to do JUMPs to other banks). And that's when we started looking to move off the 64K 8-bit Color Computer to a 16-bit platform with more memory and disk storage - and I convinced him the Amiga 500 would be ideal (which it was)!

Anyway, the program had evolved to become really perfect for doing this one, extremely valuable yet highly specialized thing and the little company grew fast and was highly profitable. He could charge quite a bit for the monthly lease because no salesperson who'd used it ever wanted to sell without it. It was really that good. In fact, the lease required the first two and last two months payments up front, and this was enough to basically pay for the computer, monitor, printer, power strip, etc. So after that, the rest of the lease contract was all profit (although, service, support and ongoing training had to be available 10 hours a day, seven days a week, including weekend onsite system replacement if necessary (which could involve driving over four or five hours round-trip on a Sunday if you were on-call that weekend)) so the customers definitely got value for their money. And supporting this highly specialized, extremely deep application took at least a full year for a new person to learn (if they were sharp) which is why in the early days we three software coders were also the support, training and field service staff). While strange in today's world, that's probably why this software became so damn polished to perfection for this use case.

For example, after selecting a home model, to update the main financing screen showing all the different loan options, all the agent had to do was punch a different interest rate, monthly payment, or down payment on the 10-key and it would recalculate all the loans with the new parameter. They didn't even have to select an input field because the program dynamically figured out based on the value typed and the sales price if the entered value should be interpreted as a rate, monthly payment or down payment.

In an era before spreadsheets, without this program, it took these agents at least three minutes to change one parameter for one loan on a manual TI paper-tape adding machine. But our program recalced a dozen loans in two seconds (including every possible option from full amortization tables to rate buy-downs). This made providing full, clear and detailed answers to every customer question trivial (like "How much more do I need to put down to reduce the monthly payment by $500?"). To these sales people this seemed like literal voodoo magic ("How does it know that what I typed in was the desired monthly payment?") :-)

Last I heard the company had transitioned the program to Windows PCs sometime in the mid-90s and was still around in some form post-2000.

I'm not sure what to think of a guide that "highly recommends" to install "QuickVerse Bible 4.0" AND "PC-Study Bible 2.1" ...?

Also, disabling the task scheduler, NTP and windows file sharing? Disabling Windows updates without suggesting an offline update package? yeah, no, thanks.

To me at least half of this guide sounds like snake oil or cargo cult.

But yeah, some things might be useful for some people. The trick is finding the needle in the haystack

I just read through this writeup and my compliments to the author!

From a semi regular XP user, this writeup is exemplary. Well done.

I would use it. And in fact I do have an XP machine setup for embedded development. It runs great and the tools are stable and robust.

When I need to use those devices, I can just fire it up and go.

Risks are low too. Keep online use by the book, focused and there just us not that much to worry about

That’s a great story, thanks for sharing. Where in the world did you deploy 1000 Amiga 500s?

Wow, that's almost as old a website as this one:

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

My username is a oblique reference to HHGTTG, so it had some effect on me. :)

Dirk Gently was underrated though.

OP here. I like to read "finge" writeups like this. Hobbyist-level question to the community here, though: what do you think about the ideas and approaches of the author (and of actually using XP for casual tasks or work these days)?

I related more to Dirk Gently than I did to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The whole bit about the couch and the hapless Mac going bonk mesmerized me.

As usual, the antiquarian covers a lot of ground (partly around Adam's books), but does talk about the disappointing Starship Titanic game and how Adams' fans felt about his other work.

He later regretted the tone of Mostly Harmless and wanted to revisit with another book (but died before he began serious work on it).

(author) Hey, thanks!

Unfortunately, very little of this article is accurate.

The Apple III's RAM is located on a separate board mounted above the motherboard using a custom connector. The initial RAM connector had a design flaw that wasn't caught during testing and ended up shipping. The flaw caused the machine to intermittently lose connection to its RAM, and without RAM the machine obviously doesn't run. Jostling things around restores the connection to RAM and get things working again.

Apple redesigned the RAM connector and then recalled all of the initial machines through their authorized dealer network. Every motherboard was replaced, regardless of whether it exhibited problems or not. Apple continued to sell the Apple III for four years using the same aluminum heat sink for its entire run. During that run it was as reliable as any other machine on the market.

The Apple III never had an overheating problem. It did not contain chips that were magically able to unseat and reseat themselves. These were all just theories that people invented to try to explain the behavior they were seeing. The theories were complete fiction, and are laughably preposterous in retrospect. And yet, the theories continue to be repeated as fact 40+ years later.

The Apple III was an important chapter in Apple's history not because it was a dud, but because of the way it developed an untrue reputation for poor reliability that it was never able to shake in the four years it was manufactured and sold.

The "Drop Three Inches" podcast is a great listen if you want to more about the Apple III. http://drop-iii-inches.com

This was quite possibly the first microcomputer I ever touched and used at a computer camp my middle school offered in the late 70s. I had used terminals and teletype with bigger iron before that.

Thing that I dreaded with Netware was doing a COMPSURF on a drive. Usually Netware was deployed with large drives (for the era) and it took forever. I remember when Quantum shipped drives that were pre-compsurfed out of the box. Game changing

He spoke to that in the video a little bit. He had to draw the text using shape tables using a font from Beagle Brothers. I am not sure if they had the stock font from thr Apple rom available.

Great as always. Fantastic level of effort here.

Somewhat surprised to not see the Autodesk FLC animation format on this site also totally surprised to see AutoCAD DWG described as usually you only see the open .DXF format.

Ah, that is a good incentive to get them using it! Smart.

Close, but the font on the map screen is wrong. In the movie, I think it's just the regular IIe character set on HGR. His font glyphs are close but not quite right.

Wendell Sanders — Apple III engineer — is on record saying this was due to corrosion on the memory board connectors, not to heat. Dropping or moving the computer with force would cause the contacts to rub together and clear the corrosion temporarily. The problem went away when they upgraded the connectors.

This was a thing with the Amiga 500 computer too. The computer would start crashing intermittently due to its "Fat Agnus" becoming unseated in its square socket, especially during shipping and thermal expansion/contraction. The chip got its nickname because it was a square packaged upgrade version of the earlier rectangular Agnus chip in the Amiga 1000.

I worked at a company which had a field deployment of over a thousand Amiga 500s (each with a custom 1MB + RTC upgrade board) connected via composite video to a 13" monochrome monitor and an Okidata 182 dot matrix printer. These machines only ever ran one custom program which auto-booted from the internal 880k floppy. The program was written in C by myself and two other devs. We also doubled as the support, service, training, installation and shipping staff for this fleet.

Since we shipped them to each field location and they tended to be in locations which weren't well thermally controlled after hours, we got a fair number of these errors. Since the vast majority of our users were older female office workers who'd never touched a computer before, any error would trigger a support call. It wasn't easy to convince these nice ladies on the phone to lift the computer 6 inches and then drop it! But it did always fix the problem. We called it a "technical drop" :-)

As an Amiga owner and enthusiast I'm the one who primarily convinced this small company that the newly announced A500 was the best low-cost option to run field deployments of their niche application and, aside from this occasional error problem, the fleet performed admirably over many years. Especially considering the machines were individually shipped to each field location and these tended to be pretty rough environments like temporary offices with spotty power (think construction trailers).

I'm proud my unorthodox recommendation ended up working out so well since, despite my obvious bias, the A500 really was the perfect fit for this unique application in early 1987. The software app itself was related to finance, so it had to have a 10-key and the entire system had to fit on a small side desk attached to a shared desk used by different people in a crowded temporary office. It had to be self-booting, self-maintaining and dirt simple. It also had to be reliable because they frequently got moved around in the field between desks and buildings. So being all-in-one really helped since every extra wire and component was another thing to lose and/or break. Trust me, talking to a nice lady on the phone who'd never seen a computer in person through reconnecting a machine someone else had disconnected and moved the day before was a rapid education on how to communicate physical instructions clearly! I always just pictured them as my sweet elderly aunt which helped keep my cool :-). Finally, the system had to be super cheap because they got stolen fairly often (no security after hours in these isolated remote offices).

Although entirely unknown at the time or after (since there was no reason for this small company serving a narrow niche market to do any PR) this was, as far as I know, the largest ever corporate deployment of Amiga computers.

One interesting note: the application was written to only use the keyboard, mostly just the arrow keys plus a few keys we labeled with custom stickers like Go, Back, Main Menu and Print. Usually we never even supplied the Amiga mouse with the systems, however I was optimistic we could show the users how to operate the mouse so they could run other apps if they wanted to. I conceded defeat after trying to teach the first half dozen users I did installs for how to use the "Bonus Mouse". I thought some would eventually get it but the necessary eye-hand coordination completely eluded these nice ladies circa 1987.

I call this percussive maintenance

The quest of Matthias Rustemeyer to hold all 32 world records for a Mario Kart 64. Thrilling tale as he sought to get all 32 and other record holders ganged up to prevent iit.

Warts and all made a lot of people read the article.

To be fair that was my submission not the original article (typo and all)

My father in-law worked in corrections in Canada. When they started getting computers in the early 2k. They trained in solitaire to get the hang of clicking and moving the mouse. Effective.