Re: Microsoft to force new Outlook on Windows 10 PCs

On 1/16/25 5:42 AM, -hh wrote:

On 1/16/25 1:41 AM, Physfitfreak wrote:

On 1/15/25 7:34 PM, Paul wrote:

The enthusiast sites have more info, if you need it.
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https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-pc-builds-gaming

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$500 computer is a "budget" computer these days? Hehe :)

 Sure is.
 In 1981, IBM's original PC 5150 debuted at $2,880 for a 64K system with one floppy drive.  In today's dollars, that would be a shade over $10K.
 Back in that era, PC Magazine's editor Bill Machrone quipped:
"the computer you want always costs $5,000."
 And 1984's price buster of the TI-99/4A started at $525.  What percentage of your gross monthly pay was $525 back in 1984?
Don't know about you, but for me, it would've been around 33%.
  -hh

$525 was about half of what I made in 1984. Back then I was getting $700 and something per month for TA/RA work in school. I also made money by tutoring ($75 per sitting no matter how long the sitting lasted - rarely over 4 hours). I had at least one tutoring session per week, so that was another $300 a month. So about $1000 per month, and I lived comfortably (money-wise that is - in reality I was conducting a tough as well as quite challenging life in graduate school).
But you (and I so far in this post) are digressing from the point I made.
I didn't pay "$525" for a computer in 1984. I had a VAX/VMX minicomputer in the physics department always available for me. And before that, when IBM sold its "$2880" computers, I had a PDP-11 in the physics department at my disposal 24 x 7. A few years later they were asking us "Who wants this PDP-11?" Student or secretary or prof didn't matter. Nobody in physics department wanted it. A prof in the chemistry dept took it to his office.
So how much _did_ I pay for a computer.
I pulled out three Commodore 64 computers together with their power supplies (just two) and one disk drive, all packed inside a box, from the garbage dumpster of my apt complex I believe in 1986, or was it 1985. Somebody must've moved and had a "better" computer. Two of them worked perfectly. I wrote programs on them that I'm still using today! For one, a calendar conversion program I wrote handled conversions between Iranian lunar, Iranian solar, the Gregorian and before that the Julian solar dates nicely. Maximum error just one day! And you could go back in time even to the days of Darius if you insisted, cause I also took into account the precession of the Earth's rotational axis. I know of no calendar inversion software (accessible to public) that does that. They'll get even the season wrong if you go back that far, let alone the day.
I wrote it first in BASIC (SIMONS BASIC cartridge - $5), then after finding some German C compiler for Commodore in the consignment store ($10), I wrote that same calendar Program in C on the Commodore. In early 1990s I didn't have access to university computers anymore, and when I had my first XT ($30 from consignment store) I adjusted that C calendar program to Borland's C ($20 with all the 11 or so yellow-red books that accompanied the software - same consignment store). So I created an EXE file for the calendar that ran on a DOS computer, which last time just yesterday I used to convert calendars when reading a history book. It runs fine in DOSBox emulator on linux.
I sometimes use other programs too, today, that I originally wrote on that same Commodore. A two and three dimensional graphing/plotting software that went through same modifications as the calendar program. And as lately as the lock down Covid months, I was converting them to C++ intending to make them fully object oriented. But my laptop (another near-salvage I don't even remember from where - I think the Chinese company I worked for were getting rid of them or something) stopped getting charged and I had to leave that project inside that laptop.
On my XT, early in 1990s, I developed serious scientific programs to compute various slow changing processes throughout hundreds of thousands of years. That's how I found out Whites are Cro-magnons! How long it takes for skin to become transparent by lack of enough sunlight. That Neanderthals were transparent skinned people. How long the matriarchy period lasted. etc.
Do you get the picture?
I don't need a $5000 computer for any reason under the sky, not even a $500 computer. Those who need them must want to do a Jupiter flyby :)
Right now I'm using a computer that I bought last week for $12 in a _thrift_store.