Mac on the way... soon to be ranting about Mac OS X every day

[yesthattom]

After getting all the right permissions from my employer, my Mac has finally been ordered.

Wow, I've never owned a Mac. I was an Amiga bigot. How bad was I? I invented the Usenet newsgroup name "comp.sys.amiga.advocacy" (and the ".advocacy" moniker has been become a Usenet tradition.)

Thinking about it today, it dawned on me that Mac OS X is exactly what every Amiga person always wanted. You see, the die-hard Amiga users were also Unix heads. We mod'ed AmigaDOS to the point where we were using ported Unix shells, Unix editors, Unix commands, etc. It was faux-Unix with a killer user interface. No memory management, but what's a crash or two? Mac OS X is all that, but its REAL unix (and not that lame AT&T SVRx stuff either) with real memory protection and real VM.

I can't wait!

Comments

[emmett-the-sane.livejournal.com]

Welcome on board! I too thought the same things about the Mac, as an old Amigahead (I was nuts enough to be on the board of directors of a local Amiga club, and write a column for the newsletter, as late as 1995).

I didn't even consider the MacOS from 85 (when I first encountered it) until late 2001.

Presently, I use a mix of OSx and PC.

What model are you getting?

[cpj.livejournal.com]

So, when you invented that Amiga newsgroup, was there even newsreader software out for the Amiga by then? Or were you still dialing up to a Unix hosting using JRComm?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

We didn't have TCP/IP connectivity, if I remember correctly. There was Matt Dillion's home-grown networking system (the name I can't remember) that ran over a serial like to a UNIX box, and terminal emulators. I used one of those two depending on the situation.

--tal

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

YOU are responsible for .advocacy? Sheesh. THANKS!

Heh. 8)

.advocacy

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I actually spent a week categorizing every post on comp.sys.amiga and comp.sys.amiga.tech. I came up with about 20 categories. After a week, I posted statistics and showed that the posts tended to fall into some obvious groupings. My post included a recommendation of how things should be reorganized. There had been a lot of debating about how to reorganize comp.sys.amiga.*, and this ended the debate. Everyone else had theories, I had hard numbers. My suggestions became, with little change, the first draft of the comp.sys.amiga reorganization.

One of those categories was "my computer is better than your computer" discussions. Everyone hated these, but they wouldn't die. I realized that there was no technical way to eliminate them, so I decided it was best to make a place for these discussions and then ignore that place.

My proposal was something like, "I also propose comp.sys.amiga.advocacy. Nobody should read this newsgroup. I know I won't. However, when someone posts a troll about why the Amiga sucks, we can simply say 'What an exciting discussion topic! We'd love to continue this discussion in comp.sys.amiga.advocacy! Then, since none of us read that newsgroup we won't have to see it. Surely there will be some poor sucker dumb enough to read that group and reply to the trolls. However, we smart people will know that the .advocacy group is a ruse. Better yet, we'll set up our killfile to ignore things crossposted to that group."

It worked. I fooled everyone.

However, some people didn't quite get it. Soon there was comp.sys.(name every vendor in the world).advocacy. Flame wars would be crossposted to every single damn .advocacy group on the net. At least I'm told this is true... my killfile ignored them all.

I wish I could find that Usenet post where I announced my statistics. When Google got the Usenet archive I looked for it but couldn't find it. Maybe it will turn up some day.

Re: .advocacy

[xeger.livejournal.com]

Hrm... interesting! Speaking of amigas, it used to be an amusing waste of time to wander over to the #amiga channel, and come up with a statement like "It's a shame that amigas are only good for graphics" - the idea being to start off the usual advocay flamewar without triggering an instant kick...

Shades of poking things to see what happens

[discosheena.livejournal.com]

i noticed you had me as one of your friends...who are you?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I was searching for LJ's in New Jersey and yours popped up. I thought you had interesting things to say.

If you want me to de-friend ya, just let me know.

--Tom