A Trip Down Computing Memory – And How Far We’ve Come

I was talking with a friend the other day, about the “prehistoric” days of computing, about things we did in our youth tinkering with PCs, which ignited our interest in computers. And apart from this proving a fascinating “walk down memory lane”, these reminiscences got me thinking about some of the features of modern Operating Systems we take for granted today.

My earliest experience was on an Apple IIe, with a Z80 card installed, which allowed me to run what seemed to me at the time, an incredibly powerful Operating System, CP/M. And the highlight of using CP/M was what I thought was a very sophisticated Word Processor, Wordstar.

For those not familiar with this now ancient program, here’s a fantastic video from Youtube, which provides a quick overview of the use of Wordstar. And although I can’t be certain, given the “naming” of the drive used, I suspect it is actually being launched (very slowly) from a “floppy disk” – and for those who don’t know what they are – yes they’re the things that look like the Save Button in modern programs, that no one uses any more!

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How a Mac OS Crash Caused SOME of my software to stop working – And why

On my main office Mac – a 64 GB 2020 i7 iMac – with lots of external drives, I had an unexpected, catastrophic failure a week ago. The sort that after the machine restarts, you get Mac OS saying: “Your machine was restarted because of a problem …” and you get asked to send a report to Apple, etc, etc … From memory, I think that the issue revolved around “kernel panic”. However, as the machine appeared to have come back up fine – it seemed – I didn’t pay that much attention to the issue, and got back to work. But then I noticed that some things weren’t working as expected. And some of my Drives weren’t mapped correctly. What was going on?

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An Excellent Monitor, AND a great KVM Switch into the Bargain

Now that so many of us are working from home, new challenges arise in our study or home office. Many will be forced to use two computers – our own, and a computer provided by our employer, because it has a prescribed or controlled operating environment, or connectivity or tools installed. Unless you’ve got a really big desk, or actually like typing on laptop keyboards – does anyone? – it’s going to get very crowded if you need to have separate external keyboards and mice for both machines, so I’ve commonly used KVM (Keyboard / Video Mouse) switches in the past – of varying levels of sophistication.

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System Auditing – Using SQL Server System Versioned Temporal Tables – A very valuable and much overlooked feature

How many times over your career have you had to create some form of audit trail functionality within a system or project you’ve worked on? The answer for me is often. Depending on your preferences, and probably experience, there’s several ways of doing so.

There’s a few obvious points you could implement auditing, each of which have good points and bad points:

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A Cautionary Tale on Buying “specialized” items on eBay

I am a big fan of eBay. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve purchased many fantastic things on eBay. And in the past have sold some remarkable things on eBay – a cubby house, pool fencing, some amazing things – very successfully. And in general, with technology related items, I’ve had great success. So when I needed to purchase some accessories for my now aging iPad Pro, eBay came to mind.

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