Damn, I missed all the fun as Orange havent delivered the mail for
over a week ;o( Not even the message to tell me that I need to agree
to their new conditions before I can use my mail account (via an
email
client or even their webmail interface). How dumb and unhelpful is
that!
On Orange broadband here and no end of annoying little problems even
though no major outages. My big gripe is their tech helplines -
foreign and totally incapable of appreciating (language permitting)
that there can be any sort of problem, let alone what it is. They seem
to have a "we are Orange, we are perfect, therefore you must be wrong"
approach. You are guilty until you prove yourself innocent beyond any
whisker of doubt.
Service slows right down in the afternoons when local kids come home
from school - yet it's only a small village, god knows what it's be
like in a big town. Or maybe that's the reason?
Regarding floppies, No, you cant format DD disks in Vista or W7 as
the
native drivers dont support it. No problem reading them, though, and
no problem formating HD disks from W7 or from within QPC - at least
there shouldnt be. Solution: Copy your old stuff to HDDs and go on
living!
I suspect Rich might have been copying stuff for a customer onto DD
disks when this thread started. Likewise, I get the occasional request
for stuff on DD disks. Apart from archived old QL disks, I never use
floppy disks for my own QLing any more.
As for the QL future, I guess there aint any, at least not at the
present (if that makes sense). Modern computers have evolved far
beyond what was envisaged when the QL was young. Surely we dont need
yet another way of doing the same old tired things any fool can now
do
with Linux, Windoze or Macs. The current trend appears to be towards
Cloud computing, where data storage and even processing power is an
off-site, on-line service. Thats a major paradigm shift - back to
square one, some three or four generations ago.
Using online applications is a bugbear here. Type something and then
the whole thing stops while it's sent and handled. Part of the thrill
of living in an area where dial-up is modern high tech I guess.
There is still the possibility that some of the seminal concepts
from
the QL era will come round again in a new form in the future, so its
worthwhile hanging on in there and keeping it alive as best we can.
And if not, weve still had our moneys worth!
Definitely. I think the one thing that came out of this discussion is
that the QL has meant a lot to many of us and it still has its uses in
knocking up a quick basic program to do a specific task. It's more
than a quarter of a century old, discontinued a quarter of a century
ago and people have said here they felt it never really knew its role
in life. People still use ZX81s and Spectrums and other 1980s
computers - I guess some of them are retro games machine whereas the
QL has been more of a home programming machine in some ways. Either
way, it's had a good innings even if it slowly passes away. It still
has its uses for me but I can also see the day sometime in not too
many years when it won't.
Dilwyn Jones
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