Adam troubles (was: Re: Dumbing down of computing...)

Jim Whitehead (ejw@ics.uci.edu)
Wed, 18 Jun 1997 16:21:05 -0700


>Well, here's a look at that alternative. In case there's any doubt
>(there certainly was on Usenet when this was first posted), the guy is
>completely for real; in particular, the AdamCON was (and is --- they
>did still keep going) an actual event. Note in particular his words
>on the plight of Adam software vendors.

Wow, hard to believe that speech was written in 1995. Adam on a card ... I
wonder why nobody considered doing a software emulator -- apparently there
exist software emulators for other 8 bit platforms. It's also interesting
that he considered the EPROM fade to be a real issue, although it appears
that there hadn't been any reported cases of it. I wonder how long those
EPROMs really do hold their data....

The media obsolescence issue is also really important -- what would I do if
I wanted to get access to one of my High School papers, originally written
using AppleWriter. It'd be tough to retrieve the file -- I'd have to find
an Apple with a modem and Xmodem it up to some Unix system I suspect.

- Jim