Operating system preferences survey

Server's in the cloud running Centos 6.7.Development machine is a MacBook Pro 16" with the M1 Pro chip. The OS is Monterey (12.0.1), which has Apple's Darwin underneath, which is a Unix-like OS close enough to Linux for me not to care. Most of the time I'm on Linux. Apple started encouraging users to switch to the zsh shell a few years ago and it seems fine.--Percy

I used Cygwin on Windows to provide Linux-like capability. It wasn't perfect but pretty serviceable. The neat thing was that my Linux windows coexisted with all my Windows windows and apps. Copy/pasting back and forth was easy, e.g., between Emacs and Word or between a PDF and a shell.--Percy

You mean iPhones or Macs or the whole ecosystem? Anyway, Apple has no cheap or base level models, so the cost of entry is higher on average, but Apple's prices have plenty of company among equivalent desktops, laptops and cell phones.I like Windows machines, used them for development for years, but I finally got tired of the expense and the "reinstall all my software from scratch and copy over all data and read it back in" drudgery (particularly Apache, MySQL, PHP, Outlook and iTunes) that I had to repeat every two or three years because they'd fail or become unreliable. I've never had a MacBook fail or go wonky, and when I upgrade, as I recently did, Migration Assistant brings everything over automatically in a couple hours, including every single setting no matter how obscure as far as I can tell, from the old Mac to the new.There *was* a problem with Apache and PHP on the new Apple Silicon. The Apache httpd.conf file I've used for years and years across a couple Macs no longer worked, and finding the offending directives took several hours of trial and error (Nothing in error.log. I have no idea why they didn't work and do not know what loading the modules mod_slotmem_shm.so and mod_negotiation.so does. I looked them up but my background and experience do not run much in that direction and I didn't understand the explanations.). And PHP is no longer preinstalled on Monterey, so I had to install it myself.Another problem: I discovered a couple productivity apps that didn't work on the new Apple silicon. They run fine, they just don't do anything. They are fluor and Alt-Tab. I expect this situation is common.--Percy

I started out on a PDP-8 programming assembler. My first home computer ran Windows-95.--Percy

Good old Zilog - those were the days. I never had a computer built from any of the early microprocessors. At work we would talk about building our own computers and collected spare chips from salvage (boards field service's repair depot couldn't fix). Only one of us ever did anything, cobbling something together that displayed on his TV. It was kind of hard to get motivated since we had mainframes at our beck and call at work. We kept up with the rapidly evolving microprocessor offerings, studying their architectures from the 8008 to the 8080 to the Z80 to the 8085 to the 8086 to the 80186 and then I must have lost interest.--Percy

RSTS/E using an ASR-33?--Percy

The first PDP-8 I used fit in several 6-foot cabinets of discrete DTL logic on scores of cards, with only five or ten logic gates per card. Two of the cabinets were logic, one was the hard drive two or three feet in diameter and mounted vertically, and another contained the paper tape reader/puncher and the switch panel, 12 of them, one for each bit. This was in the days before boot proms, and the boot program had to be toggled in, though this was also in the days of magnetic core memory, so the computer didn't forget the program when you turned it off. If you were the last one to use it then when you turned it on your program would resume running. The paper tape reader was originally completely mechanical, but they replaced it with a new one with an optical reader, super-fast and quiet. I never had any ASR-33 speed problems. Ten characters per second was far faster than I could manage. Entering and editing programs was the hardest part because you had to keep telling it to type a range of 5 or 10 lines on the bathroom-style roll of paper so you could see the portion of interest.The second PDP-8 I used was actually a PDP-8e that fit in a single box about the size of a serious home AV receiver. It used TI 7400 logic.--Percy

At my university in 1973 most people were still using punchcards. There were ASR-33's available but not used much - I guess many found them just too painful. But that year I had the great good fortune to discover a Tektronix video terminal in an open side room of the computing center running at 9600 baud. In two column mode it could display around 60 lines of program all at once. It was wonderful and very few people used it. Maybe many thought a portrait oriented green screen too weird.--Percy