Super Bloat Ware

I trade my DVD player to my sister for her old lap top , with the understanding that I can borrow it whenever i wind up in the hostpital again. since I have ..lemme see, two dvd players on this computer, one on the other , one in the living room... four dvd players at home , this seems like a pretty good deal to me. Especially since , with a lap top in hand , I probably won't care about a dvd player in the hospital anyways.

The lap top is ... ancient.

4 meg ram , 120 meg hard drive. No pcmcia ports , no phone modem , no network ports ... some kind of custom port on the back , probably predates the existance of pcmcia ports so you're never going to find anything that fits it. It has a floppy disk drive, and thats about it.

How did she get win95 on it in the first place ? I'm impressed.

I put dos 5 on it, and win 3.1 . Yes...yes... I know, my age is showing. Especially when you realize I have original disks for all of that. You're impressed ? I'm impressed, those disks only come with a one year warrenty and thinking back I think I've been carting them around for 15 years. And they still work !

This fills about 8 megs on my 120 meg hard drive. This ...is much better. Now it has room to manouver. I catalog my other disks.

Word processer , 2 floppys (about 3 megs) , spread sheet , the old quattro pro , is the same. An old database , not an ms-access knock off but a real one , Omnis 5 , also 2 megs. I recall an old version of dbase fits on 1 disk but I don't have it.

I'm now thinking of my sisters brand new lap top, with the latest ms-office. It requires several thousand megabytes , in effect , gigabytes , to do the same thing this old lap top could already do 15 years ago.

yes, I mean full color , spell checkers, relational databases not those stupid little one table ones everyone gives away but full blown ones that could actually challenge oracle databases, the whole nine yards. 15 years ago. Color print out's too and everything.

So ... her brand spanking new lap top can do..what ? That this grand old lady of a lap top can't ?

Thinking ... thinking ...
It can play mp3's. Poorly. Through low quality speakers.

The technical name for this , by the way , is "Bloat Ware", whereby you are forced to upgrade software and hardware to remain compatable with everyone else ... but the new systems don't actually *DO* anything more for you than the old stuff did.

15 years ... my how far we HAVN'T come ... lol