Re: The joy of Linux

On Wed, 6 Nov 2024 11:31:21 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

In the beginning computers were Very Expensive, and God said "Lo, let
them time share"

Actually, the computing gods said “let them use batch”. Timesharing was
considered a very inefficient use of scarce and expensive computing
resources.

It took the advent of cheaper minicomputers from (at the time) new
companies like DEC, Data General, Perkin-Elmer, Prime and others, that
were purpose-built for this newfangled interactive timesharing usage, to
allow it to really grow in popularity.

And then the next step was the microcomputer, where machines became cheap
enough that one could sit there spending 99% of its time waiting for the
user to hit the next key (or click the mouse button, when those came along
a little bit later).