"Because I'm a Lemming, yeah yeah, yeah..."

[lagilman]

Yeah, that sounds about right. I used to be a Speaker to Nerds, back in the day, before it was called anything as trendy as "the Internet," and we all used DOS and liked it, by god.

Okay, we didn't really like it. At all. But it rarely crashed...

Comments

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

(http://www.wxplotter.com/ft_nq.php)

...why am I not surprised?

-=Jeff=-

[sdn.livejournal.com]

i was 24%.

[girasole.livejournal.com]

I was 38 percent, too. I thought I was, well, nerdier.

Nerd-Q

[(Anonymous)]

And I'm a bit nerdier than I'd have guessed. Must be because I own a telescope... PH


(http://www.wxplotter.com/ft_nq.php)

Re: Nerd-Q

[lagilman]

PH? Pete, 'zat you? Or do we have a newcomer? Identify yourself! :-)

Re: Nerd-Q

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, dat's me. Just droppin' by -- I couldn't resist the chance to flash the score. ;-) PH

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Hardly seems possible....

Do I get to use the royal "we"?

[(Anonymous)]

I am a Nerd King, at 94%. Like this is surprise...

But since I pale in comparison to some folks I know, I wonder if it's possible to score more than 100% on the test.

And I used to wish DOS "rarely crashed". :-(
______
Dennis

Re: Do I get to use the royal "we"?

[lagilman]

Comparatively speaking, it rarely crashed. Even back when I was Apple tech support in college (yeah, I used to play on that side of the Force), the crashes were too many for comfort. And having a little unhappy face and woeful noise come up on-screen didn't make it any better. DOS just went "f*ck you" and died.

Re: Do I get to use the royal "we"?

[(Anonymous)]

I guess it depended on what you did with it. But yes, it just sort of stopped dead in its tracks, and you did the three-fingered salute, or hit the power switch. If you hadn't saved your work lately, you might have been disgruntled, but...

A company I once worked for got a batch of no-name PC clones running DOS we offered to customers. We discovered the hard way they had a tendency to spontaneously reboot in use. I spoke to one customer who was 30 pages into an (unsaved) document when it happened to him. (He was remarkably calm and unruffled about it. I was tempted to ask where he got his drugs...) I got to make the call to the distributor we got them from, and got an "Oh, great! Now I've got to call Taiwan and hope I can get someone who speaks English..." response from thier support manager.

Still, neither case quite matches the Amiga's "Guru Meditation" crash screen. (If you had the secret decoder ring, the string of numbers on the screen was actually a meaningful indicatior of what happened, but few folks had one.)

Apple just announced a $500 mini Mac, and various IT folks at my shop are drooling. The tech in the next cube said "Oh, yeah! I checked it out. But once I got finished customizing it to be what I want, it would cost more like two grand, so I'm not running out and buying one just yet..."
______
Dennis