Remember those thrilling days of yesteryear?

... and the Plus in Mac Plus was that it came WITH a SCSI interface. Of course the drive had to be an external drive, but oh well.

Yesteryear... I still have my original Mac 128 with the signatures of the Apple staff involved in its' production, embossed on the inside of the case. From memory there are about 50 or so signatures including Steve's. Imagine trying to repeat that feat today?

You were lucky to have a budget for two 2400 baud modems and a Mac II. Some of us started with a 300 baud modem and an apple IIc. We had to update to a 2400 when West Publishing offered legal research by bulletin board at $6.00 per minute.

Yes 2400 baud was 'fast' back then. It didn't take long to bump up to 14.4 then 28.8 and finally 33.6.

Does anyone remember OneNet? It was a group of Mac BBS's linked via phone lines called gateways. Scott Converse started the network which gained momentum pretty quickly within the Mac community. The big sites were OneNet Boulder, Digitalnation, Magic, and TVOntario. But there were a lot of really interesting smaller sites such as us (newsroom), Maquarium (Marco), Insane Domain (Aaron), Deep Blue (Rob), and others whose names escape me.

We soldiered on until this summer and I think we were the last superhub standing, I think there was one other site still out there though they had stopped connecting a year ago which was AUSOM in Australia. When ever I upgraded a server I kept the old one so I have some interesting snapshots from our first setup on the Classic back in the early 90's, then the IIsi, Mac II, LC 475, PowerCenter Pro, B&W G3 server, G4 500DP and finally the Mac Mini Core i5. Also in the mix is a PowerBook 100 which at one point was used as a gateway server.

<blockquote class="jive-quote"><p>hellopaul2 wrote:</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;">&#160;</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;">&#160;</p><p>Does anyone who remembers what could be done with 10MB RAM, a 40MB hard disc and a snail-pace processor, get disappointed by how little progress has been made by software, considering the ~1000x increase in hardware speed and capacity? I suspect that programmers "these days" are lazy...</p></blockquote>

OSX has 5 to 10 times the overhead of OS9. Part of this is due to its pre-emptive multitasking, but much is not. MS Word 2007 takes about as long to open on my 2 GHz G5 in OS 10.4 as Word 5 did on my old Mac SE. That's a 1 MHz machine with 4 MB of RAM. (Word 2007 is ridiculously slow to open on a 3GHz core-2 duo PC on campus too, so the same is true in MS Windows.) Part of this is MS Word's fault, and part is the OS, but both are bloatware.

Over time, people become lazy and simply build on what's already been done. At the same time, they have a vested interest in seeing their paying job continue, so they make up things to do, i.e. add useless features, patch jobs, rewrite things for no reason, etc. Hence we have OS 10.7, Windows 7, Word 2007 (or maybe there's an even newer version, God forbid), etc.

EDIT: This forum is a great example of bloatware. Only marginally functional anymore, slow, useless features and pages to wade through, etc. I cannot get the quote above to display properly, but quotes worked fine a year or so ago before they changed the whole look and layout of these discussions.