"Please insert next disc"

[julesjones]

I am re-installing Windows, and by extension Everything Else. I have been doing this for over a week now, and do not expect to finish before Monday. Knowing that it would take this long (if I was lucky) was one of the reasons I'd been putting it off, even though my installation has been getting steadily flakier for the last six months.

However, I am now at the stage where I have the OS, the million and one updates to the OS, my preferred browser, my grudgingly accepted but unloved primary viruschecker, and my prise-from-my-cold-dead-hands email/usenet client installed. Which means that I have contact with the outside world again, even if I'm still installing the other stuff, including my preferred office suite (which is not either MS or OpenOffice, thank you).

The one good thing about this process is that each piece of software comes on a single shiny disc. I remember all too clearly the days of sitting there with a stack of 15 floppies to install the then-current version of the preferred office suite...

(No, I do not want to move to Linux, not unless you want to write a Linux version of the email/usenet client and the office suite for me. Bear in mind that the office suite in question is in fact optimised for OS/2, and that I have been using it since the time of the OS/2 divorce. And that I occasionally fantasise about a port to VMS.)

Comments

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I was about to post that I bet that I was the only person on your flist who had a hope of guessing what your prise-from-my-cold-dead-hands email/usenet client is. Unfortunately I'm too late. :)

BTW, what version of Windows are you using?

[julesjones]

There are a couple of other Demonites who could have guessed. :)

I'm using XP Pro. It came with my ThinkPad, one of the benefits of coughing up for a business class machine back in the days when I knew people who could get me an IBM machine at employee discount rates. The re-install used the ThinkPad's built-in recovery facilities that will restore to factory condition from a hidden partition, which meant that I started from a base of 2006-vintage XP Pro Service pack 2, and then spent a day or two letting it fetch five years' worth of updates. XP Pro is actually not that bad, apart from its standard MS habit of accumulating cruft and bit rot over the years until it eventually breaks.

Sooner or later Turnpike will no longer be usable with whatever version of Doze is on a new computer, and I will be forced to export the spool and find something more modern. At that point I will probably re-consider Linux. Reluctantly. I used RSTS and then VMS before I ever met any of the Spawn of Redmond, so I don't automatically consider *nix the One True OS.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm still using Turnpike. At some point this desktop machine will have to be replaced, either because it breaks down or because I get to the point where new peripherals won't work with XP and I am forced to upgrade OS. I have no idea what email client I'll use then, though I gave up reading Usenet a couple of years ago, so I no longer need a Usenet client.

I have seriously considered moving to Linux at that point, partly to keep the cost down, but I do like PhotoShop Elements and I don't know what the equivalent for Linux would be. I have tried GIMP and found it very user unfriendly. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

[julesjones]

I finally got around to installing 6.07, since I was installing anyway, and the readme for that explains how to install it in Vista, so they clearly did manage to get that working (they were still thrashing out some of the bugs for Vista upgrade when I stopped reading dist semi-regularly).

One of these days I may get the time and energy to work out how to setup the SSL workarounds needed to use it as an offline reader with things like GMail, but unfortunately everything I've ever seen on using something like stunnel is written by hackers for hackers, and assumes a lot of knowledge not possessed by the average luser.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Sooner or later Turnpike will no longer be usable with whatever version of Doze is on a new computer, and I will be forced to export the spool and find something more modern.

Yes, that was why I was asking. Apparently Turnpike 6 will run under 32 bit Windows 7 but not 64 bit unless you install a Win XP VM.

I too have fond memories of VMS, though my first love was George 3 on the ICL 1900 range.

[julesjones]

I had a year on George 3 at some point in between the RSTS and the VMS. (Something I occasionally pointed out to people on usenet who declared that the only reason people used Windows was that they were sheep-like lusers who used what came pre-installed and didn't know that there were alternatives.)

I will further show my age by pointing out that I am *still* holding a grudge against Microsoft for the AARD code episode, which resulted in me having to get the DR-DOS patch and install it for the office 386, in the days when patches came on floppies through the post.