x=usr(1536)

I'd like one in orange shag carpeting, please.

Please load me up with some tacos Three hundred dollars' worth It's that or an Ataribox Of which there is a dearth At least I know with tacos I'm guaranteed true mirth Oh, tacos instead of renders No, not renders Oh, tacos instead of renders

Understood. And I can say that it was possible to remotely access an NT4 box with GUI over dialup - provided you were running (IIRC) RAS on Terminal Server edition and really, Really, REALLY liked the remote access equivalent of repeatedly punching yourself in the nuts. I am *so* glad those days are over.

Yeah, you've got my sympathies - I've run into the same thing. To be fair, though, that doesn't strike me as a problem unique to either that vendor or RedHat; I've seen the stuff like this happen on other platforms under other similar support contracts. By any chance did the hardware vendor's name rhyme with 'hell'? This sounds remarkably similar to a problem I had a few years after yours. Ordered six servers; fBSD 6.x was the target OS for them. HCL from the vendor and fBSD project claimed that the onboard Broadcom gig-E adapters were 100% compatible. This turned out to be true... On two of the six boxes. Neither the hardware vendor nor anyone assisting on the fBSD side could figure it out until we noticed that, at some point during hardware production, the NICs had been changed to a slightly different part number but were still marked the same as the old ones and classed as being in the same family. Of course, the drivers didn't work. That one I do pin on the vendor, and we were dealing with community support since, well, it was fBSD... But much of the same fingerpointing ensued.

A lot of what I saw was that, to be sure, but also fear of deploying an OS with no contracted support behind it. More on that further down. Yeah, but remember that at the time Windows 3.1 had been out for a few years and become the de facto networked office desktop environment. NT was a way to provide services for environments like that in a relatively integrated manner while also opening up the possibility of a workstation OS within the same ecosystem for people who needed more grunt than Win3.1 could provide. That was the promise, anyway. I remember those networks, and NT on x86 was a crashy POS. Pretty good on Alpha, but utter crap on x86 until SP4 floated. RedHat were the ones who really cracked it: by providing contractual support for the OS, they removed a lot of the concern of running an open-source OS in enterprise. Sure, they weren't the first to come up with the support model, but they were the ones who really figured it out.

Or even NT4 pre-SP4. I remember having to work with machines in that config, and about the best you could say for them was that at least they weren't NT3.x.

Agreed, but there was one other significant factor that played into that: the death of VMS. Once NT was on the DEC Alpha platform, that entire end of the market had just been handed its gateway drug - and when Compaq started gradually killing off the Alpha platform in 1998, everyone who had moved to NT on Alpha had their stepping stone to NT on x86 by the time that Intel picked up the remaining pieces of the Alpha platform and eventually killed it off.

Everything suggested between pages 1 and 120 of this thread? Anyway, we're going for tacos. Not because it's Tuesday, but because tacos are awesome anytime. Tacos.

A lack of Del Taco restaurants in your area? (Let the Del Taco vs. Taco Bell flamewars officially commence )

Even the arcade game isn't worth $1000. Ignore what retailers sell them for (or what eBayers try to get for them); collectors don't typically buy from them. A decent one in working condition might set you back $500-$600, and they frequently go for less than that.

I'd say do it, but then I've been toying with a similar idea. Haven't really looked into what it would take to accomplish, but was considering a Linux / mgetty / emulation stack for it.

Yes, but Linux (and thus Alexa) still needs hardware to run on.

Hearing someone else say this makes me very, very happy. Many of the concepts that X11 presents are fine, but the implementation blows meaty chunks. It blew meaty chunks 20 years ago, and it blows them now. It blows them with great force and gusto, leaving interesting splatter patterns where they land. I first used Linux somewhere around the 1993 timeframe, but didn't dedicate a machine to it until about 1995. That was a Yggdrasil box; moved on to Slackware from there. Kept with that distro for years before finally admitting that I needed modern package management, and, after various flirtations with RedHat, CentOS, SuSE, and others, settled on Debian. Turned out to be a useful choice because, once the Raspberry Pi came along, that was its default platform. That said, the first *nix that I used was NeXTStep, which for some reason led to a liking of Solaris and FreeBSD. Both have had places in both datacentres I've worked in or built as well as at home. And I wish I'd never let my NeXT boxes go. These days, it's OS X on the Desktop, and Linux or Windows on the backend depending on what I'm looking to accomplish. But for all-time favorite... Hands-down it's BeOS. It can still do things that, 16 years after its demise, other OSes can't, or at least still don't do as well as it did. It had so much potential; it's a shame about what happened to that company.

Well... One thing I'll say in relation to this: the ZX81 (and other Sinclair computers and consumer electronics) were built to a price, and in many ways it showed. A great deal of what was being sold for them was intended to correct certain shortcomings that they had, which was a common theme amongst Sinclair products. Note that this isn't to knock the machine: they're very much a product of the time, place, and market conditions that they were developed for and in, and a really interesting part of computing history. Absolutely. And therein lies the irony: you could end up spending as much (or more) on bringing a ZX81 up to only part of the capabilities of a more powerful machine. Of course, if you're working on a budget, you can do this over time, so the initial outlay isn't as great. ZX81 (and even ZX80) fanatics are out there. But you really have to look to the UK-based forums to find them; they just didn't quite catch on to the same extent anywhere else. The Spectrum line onwards did reasonably well in the rest of Europe, however.

"Ataribox... order me up some tacos." Insert the sound of crickets, perhaps with a tumbleweed blowing through for visual reinforcement. The person placing the order eventually starves to death.

Amazon TacoCopter is currently undergoing trials in Providence, RI, Gary, IN, and John Day, OR. If trials are successful, expect a nationwide rollout between 2018 and 2020. Oh, and you'll apparently be able to summon it from a Dash button or add it as an Alexa skill.

Opinion without facts to back up the opinion pretty much is speculation. However, if Sigfox moves into the Internet of Tacos space, I can see such a collaboration making sense. 'Internet of Things' was just the buzzphrase that replaced 'BYOD' and 'Cloud'. But the Internet of Tacos? That's a forever Internet.

Essentially, yes. Let me clarify what I meant by that: at the time, game systems and computers were heavily differentiated by look and feel. An MSX-based Aquarius / Intellivision computer would have had graphical capabilities very close to the ColecoVision. This is where I feel the confusion would have crept in; it wouldn't have been able to claim ColecoVision compatibility (in the way that, say, a Sears Video Arcade could with a VCS), but, graphically, it would still look a lot like a ColecoVision despite the fact that ColecoVision titles couldn't run on it natively. Consumers probably wouldn't have known what to make of it, and it may even have made selling the system difficult. True, and I agree with you on that. It could even have been accomplished (possibly) with a third-party adapter, which would have made for an interesting machine - and if it was Intellivision-based, it could have potentially run titles from all three of the major consoles on the market at the time. You'd just have to use the appropriate expansion modules. From what I recall, the NES was only sold by Mattel in certain PAL regions. I'm not certain how that would have impacted sales of their other machines in those regions, but I can honestly say that I don't recall ever seeing a single Intellivision anywhere in Europe at the time. That's not to say that they weren't out there, but they didn't seem to take off outside of the US the same way that they did inside of it. Given this, it may have been a non-issue for Mattel to sell the NES in those regions. And if I'm not mistaken, I believe that Mattel had completely exited the video game / computer market by the time that they were selling the NES; if that memory is correct, it really would have been a non-issue for them. This, I think, is the heart of the matter - they just didn't have the money for anything else, and wanted to get something - anything - onto the market ASAP.

Re: expansion boxes and card slots: you bring up an interesting point regarding take-up in the market. Apple's 8-bit machines really succeeded in this regard: there were tons of add-in cards available for them; ditto the IBM PC. However, both of those machines came with open card slots in their chassis by default (the Apple //c series excepted). With the TI, the expansion box was an extra-cost option to get those open card slots. If I were developing a card for the TI, I'd be concerned that someone might want my card's capabilities but would be turned off by the additional expense of having to acquire the expansion box just to use my card - which, in turn, may cause me to reconsider whether the development and marketing effort necessary to sell that card was actually worth the effort. I suspect it would have been a similar situation for the XL range had the 1090 seen the light of day.

True, but those were already being sold independently in the US. I can remember seeing them in Federated Group stores in about the 1983 timeframe. Yeah, the MSX route probably would have been the better bet. Then again, it would have moved the Aquarius (or Intellivision) close enough to the ColecoVision's capabilities that the average consumer might not have been able to really distinguish between the two - and software incompatibility between both systems would probably have only furthered the confusion. Agreed. If they'd taken a similar approach to the Adam and treated the Aquarius as more of an expansion module for the Intellivision (or even made it a standalone computer with Intellivision backwards-compatibility), it might have stood more of a chance.

I have to admit that I had completely forgotten about the TS2068; for some reason, I keep thinking that Timex dropped the Sinclair line after the TS1000 flopped. That pretty much negates my earlier thought completely.

The nice thing about AtariBoxCorp, Inc. debuting it at the second event would be the ability to see it head-to-head against its immediate competition. That would make an immediate purchasing decision so much easier to come to.

No, but there's an Easter Egg in there