It has begun. Chris Simmons has been selected as the new den mother for betips.net. Just went through years of accumulation and cleared out a distributable version. Redirects, discussion boards, credits, database exports, dynamic content linked in from other sites (such as BeBits.com’s Tip of the Day), working through all the little details of domain transfer. This process is like getting ready to leave a home, or a town, or a relationship that isn’t working — leaving sounds great when you first think of it, but unbearably sad when the time actually comes.
“You’ll never miss the water ’till the well runs dry.”
Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson :: Inglan Is A Bitch
Leaving your old OS or architecture behind is tough. And doing anything that reminds you that you’ve left that old OS behind It’s just a machine, but we still somehow get an emotional attachment to it, and the more time we invested in it, either learning it or evangelizing it, the harder it is.
That’s part of the reason I’ve still got my Amiga around, and I’ve still got four versions of OS/2 around. I haven’t powered up the Amiga in more than five years, and it’s been about that long since I’ve run OS/2 also. They serve no functional purpose anymore but psychologically I need that link to the past. Weird.
Well, you spent a good chunk of your life on these devices, and it’s understandable that you want to keep something around from that time to remind you that it hasn’t been just a dream, that it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
I myself still have my Apple II clone and a whole bunch of listings from back then.
There are things I still miss about BeOS, and that’s probably what keeps that partition alive on my PC–even though I almost never boot into it, except when I’m trying to find a long-lost file. Those return visits usually remind me just how cool a system it was. With BeOS, my Celeron 433 feels much faster than my G4/550 PowerBook–something that can’t be said when the PC is running Windows 2000. And with all due respect to the Mac’s UI gurus, the BeOS UI always felt just as uncluttered and straightforward, and even more productive. With OS X 10.2 and FruitMenu installed, the Mac comes… close, but it still ain’t quite there.
I ran BeOS almost exclusively for three years at home. Occasionally I wonder if I’m exhibiting signs of computer masochism by making OS X my central platform. Of course, before BeOS, I ran DESQview/X for a couple years, and from 1978-1991 (!) I was using TRS-80s with a succession of operating systems including LS-DOS and Z-System (enhanced versions of TRSDOS and CP/M respectively), so the answer is clearly “yes.”
I wouldn’t call that ‘computer masochism’, but instead ‘old-school hackerdom’. You know, the kind where you tinker with a certain machine not because it has the largest marketshare or the most bang for the buck, but because it has a different and therefore interesting architecture.
When I compare that with some of the youngster today, whose sense of adventure is satisfied by playing with a different Linux/Windows distribution and who scorn at everything that is not ‘compatible’ … god, are they _dull_.
…hey, where did this soapbox under my feet come from?