fadden@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Andy McFadden) (08/28/89)
In article <73@iisat.UUCP> mackay@iisat.UUCP (Daniel MacKay) writes: >In article <1580001@hpspcoi.HP.COM>, melissa@hpspcoi.HP.COM (Melissa Huff) writes: >> Our family has had an Apple II for years .............................. >> ..................... Now I'm to a point where I've upgraded to a IBM > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >Ha! Melissa, you have made my day. You should post this to rec.humour. >[snigger]. >+---------+ MACKAY@DALAC.BITNET Here's one for comp.ibm.nightmare: I was working with an IBM PS/2 model 70-A21 (the top of the line, upgradeable eventually to a 80486 processor). We had a built in 1.44MB drive, an external 5.25" drive (read/write both 360K and 1.2MB), and a tape drive (125MB capacity) to back up the internal 120MB hard drive. All of the finest that IBM had to offer. Well, the tape drive had been crashing. One morning it crashed and took the 120MB hard drive with it. Kind of ironic, the backup system crashing the hard drive... Anyway, we set about to restoring from 3.5" disks. Guess what? Some weird bug in the DMA (we think) caused a few sectors to die on the last few tracks of each disk. The only reason we didn't shoot ourselves was that we were using Fastback Plus, which allows you to restore from disks in any order and tells you which tracks each file occupy... anyway, it took us two days to get everything back in working order. I also had the opportunity (misfortune?) to work with an IBM/XT. I was amazed that a 4.77 MHz machine could be so much less responsive than a 1 MHz Apple II. I guess Mensch wasn't kidding after all. After dealing with IBMs that have hard drives that drip oil, and Apples which are mothballed by the marketing dept of the manufacturer, it makes me want to buy a NeXT or an '030 Amiga (coming RSN)... It also makes me afraid of what could be wrong with those machines. -- fadden@cory.berkeley.edu (Andy McFadden) ...!ucbvax!cory!fadden