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 Post subject: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 2:56 am 
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If you don't mind, Ric, can you delete your reply in Windy's thread? All too often, I've seen a thread innocently hijacked and the original poster is left high and dry without the answer they need.

nexter wrote:
DesertDwarf wrote:
Windy wrote:
But when I click the CD control icon for my internal Blu-ray DVD/CD drive, nothing happens. Still no error message...nothing!

If you right-click the drive in File Explorer or whatever file manager you're using (like my favorite, Directory Opus), can you use the Eject or Open option there successfully?

I've been following this thread and can't recall an instance where you mentioned you tried that.

Sorry to side-track here for a moment. Ric, just how good and compatible is DOpus? I've got the trial version here but haven't had a chance yet to install. Of course, remember DOpus well from its original version for Amiga back in the day - it was fantastic! So far my fave Win PC FM has been Magellan Explorer, which was also based on the original DOpus concept, but alas it hasn't seen any development for about 8 or 9 years now, alas, and does not get on all that well with Win 10. I remember the first DOpus version for Win was all but hopeless but hoping for great things. :)

[Edit: Wow. More typos than normal for me. I was in a hurry, I guess.]

DOpus is fantastic nowadays. The support is rock-solid (like Jorge is here) and the updates are plenty. You can opt-in for their beta or just stay with the release version. They charge only when major versions are released (i.e. 11 to 12; all subversions, like 12.0 to 12.1 and 12.1 to 12.2 are included in the price of the upgrade/purchase to 12).

While I miss ARexx, being able to script using the internal commands or using a variety of outside languages is a real boon for those of us that are more technical. My wife, who is less technically included inclined than many of us that use Winstep, enjoys it for the simplicity of managing her pictures and other files.

It takes a bit to get used to the flexibility and power of the new DOpus. It's incredibly powerful. For example, you can have one source window and more than one destination window. Or, you can stay with the original side-by-side, which is my default. You can create Layouts that define all of these and switch between them at the push of a button or a keyboard shortcut.

It reads meta-data in most file types, including IPTC, EXIF, MP3 meta-data, etc.

Give the trial a spin and put it through all the testing you want. If you have issues or questions, hit up their forums. Jonathan Potter (the original DOpus programmer) and Leo (a DOpus power user who used it back on the Amiga and has since been hired as their main tech support guy and programmer) will help you with anything you can throw at them, I'm sure. (Leo is British, I believe, and likes cats.)

The DOpus "project" was bought by Dr. Greg Perry (of GPSoftware fame) back in the late Amiga days and he still runs the company.


Last edited by DesertDwarf on Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:02 am, edited 2 times in total.

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 5:57 am 
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Yes sure Ric, no problem. :)

Many thanks for all the info - really does sound as good as it seemed on their site. Will try it as soon as I can find the time.

So you're an ex-Miggy user too then Ric!? I still use some Amiga apps under WinUAE, inc. old DOpus 4.x (hated the 5.x stuff), hence the 'Girlfriends' icon in one of my docks and shelf. (Threw my little black book of real girlfriends and potential ones away when I married again many many many moons ago, LOL.) Wish I'd hung on at least to my 3K Tower (conversion, home-made) and 4K - I'd be rich now, seeing the prices even a basic 030 4K goes for here these days! ;) All the more amazing when you consider that you can pick up machines like SGI Indigo2/Indigo2 Power etc. for a song!

Computers seemed so much more fun in those days, and the still young internet was so much more useful and civilised then, before they let the 'great unwashed' loose on it. :)

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:17 am 
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nexter wrote:
Yes sure Ric, no problem. :)

Many thanks for all the info - really does sound as good as it seemed on their site. Will try it as soon as I can find the time.

If you don't find the time, then the time will find you. The question is, when it finds you, what will you do?

nexter wrote:
So you're an ex-Miggy user too then Ric!? I still use some Amiga apps under WinUAE, inc. old DOpus 4.x (hated the 5.x stuff), hence the 'Girlfriends' icon in one of my docks and shelf. (Threw my little black book of real girlfriends and potential ones away when I married again many many many moons ago, LOL.) Wish I'd hung on at least to my 3K Tower (conversion, home-made) and 4K - I'd be rich now, seeing the prices even a basic 030 4K goes for here these days! ;) All the more amazing when you consider that you can pick up machines like SGI Indigo2/Indigo2 Power etc. for a song!

I used to work for Softwood, Inc., as their tech support manager. I wrote the last Final Word manual. I handled the tech support account on CompuServe and GEnie. Fun times, indeed.

In fact, it was on one of these (CompuServe, if I recall correctly), that I found out about what would later be called Final Calc, Softwood's spreadsheet program. A charming fellow, Khalid Aldoseri, introduced himself to me and asked if I wouldn't mind beta-testing his spreadsheet. Given my presence on the system, he knew who I worked for. After I played with it and was duly impressed, I told my boss, Woody Williams (owner and lead developer of Softwood) about it. Woody, too, was impressed and took over talking to Khalid about the program. Khalid flew out and met all of us. We had some nice times together (going out to lunch and showing him around the Phoenix area). Woody and Khalid worked out a deal and we had Final Calc for sale several months later.

Khalid, as it happens, was somewhere around 143rd in succession for the "throne" of Saudi Arabia. So, technically, a prince. And, since he was family, he had money through that means. But, before even Final Calc, he had bought companies and started up companies so he was independently wealthy without even his familial connections. A very smart man and very pleasant a congenial. He wrote his spreadsheet program to handle his own companies and such. He knew he had something good but didn't want to be bothered with publishing the thing. I'm sure that's why he used me as a doorway to get to Woody.

Once every decade or so, I get to say "hi" to him in one way or another.

nexter wrote:
Computers seemed so much more fun in those days, and the still young internet was so much more useful and civilised then, before they let the 'great unwashed' loose on it. :)

Yes, well, while I think what you say is true, we have also reaped great rewards from the internet. We can even find excellent software like DOpus and Winstep and communicate with their programmers. How awesome is that?

Heck, Rics from far-flung locations can even talk to each other and wax poetic while reminiscing about the good ol' day of using their Amiga computers!


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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:44 am 
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DesertDwarf wrote:
If you don't find the time, then the time will find you. The question is, when it finds you, what will you do?


Not much, I guess, because that means he will be dead, no? ;)

nexter wrote:
I used to work for Softwood, Inc., as their tech support manager. I wrote the last Final Word manual. I handled the tech support account on CompuServe and GEnie. Fun times, indeed.


I love reading about these old 'war' stories. :)

nexter wrote:
We can even find excellent software like DOpus and Winstep and communicate with their programmers. How awesome is that?

Heck, Rics from far-flung locations can even talk to each other and wax poetic while reminiscing about the good ol' day of using their Amiga computers!


I still remember the first time I connected to the Internet using a 9600 baud modem after some time spent in local BBSs, and tried IRC (Internet Relay Chat, for those who don't know what that is anymore).

The sheer awe of being able to communicate *in real time* to people in the US and other parts of the world is something I suspect young people these days will never experience or even understand.

I still remember typing 'Are you REALLY in the US? What time is it there?' lol Pretty soon I had made friends with people from all over the place. :)

I started programming with the Sinclair computers (Zx-80, Zx Spectrum) when I was still a kid (15-16) and did some truly amazing stuff in Z80 Assembly language for them (imagine a complete BASIC interpreter running on a 3.5 Mhz Spectrum that was even faster than Amstrad's CPC 464 (already very fast) Basic running at 4 Mhz, with built in support for overlapping windows, sprites, wireframe graphics, interrupt procedures, local variables, floating point operations, the whole she-bang).

Unfortunately the Internet was still many years away when that happened, and I was therefore stuck in my little corner of Portugal.

When the Sinclair brand died, I remember looking with envy at the Amiga and Atari STs of the time, but I simply could not afford them. Eventually I started working as a programmer and got myself a 386SX PC at 25 Mhz.

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 11:12 am 
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DesertDwarf wrote:
nexter wrote:
Yes sure Ric, no problem. :)

Many thanks for all the info - really does sound as good as it seemed on their site. Will try it as soon as I can find the time.

If you don't find the time, then the time will find you. The question is, when it finds you, what will you do?

LOL! Well, not a lot really other than decay. ;)
DesertDwarf wrote:
nexter wrote:
So you're an ex-Miggy user too then Ric!? I still use some Amiga apps under WinUAE, ....

I used to work for Softwood, Inc., as their tech support manager. I wrote the last Final Word manual. I handled the tech support account on CompuServe and GEnie. Fun times, indeed.

Wow, awesome! Hey, I'm still using FW from time to time, and also its arch-rival Wordworth (which for some reason everybody always seemed to call 'Wordsworth', LOL). Simple to use, ultra-compact, both still do everything a word processor needs to do, just slightly shitty Amiga-style fonts that really should have been replaced by the end of the 80s.
DesertDwarf wrote:
In fact, it was on one of these (CompuServe, if I recall correctly), that I found out about what would later be called Final Calc, Softwood's spreadsheet program. A charming fellow, Khalid Aldoseri, introduced himself to me and asked if I wouldn't mind beta-testing his spreadsheet. Given my presence on the system, he knew who I worked for. After I played with it and was duly impressed, I told my boss, Woody Williams (owner and lead developer of Softwood) about it. Woody, too, was impressed and took over talking to Khalid about the program....

.... Once every decade or so, I get to say "hi" to him in one way or another.

Fascinating. Had no idea that that's how FC came about, and fancy you being instrumental in it coming home to roost Ric!
DesertDwarf wrote:
nexter wrote:
Computers seemed so much more fun in those days, and the still young internet was so much more useful and civilised then, before they let the 'great unwashed' loose on it. :)

Yes, well, while I think what you say is true, we have also reaped great rewards from the internet. We can even find excellent software like DOpus and Winstep and communicate with their programmers. How awesome is that?

Heck, Rics from far-flung locations can even talk to each other and wax poetic while reminiscing about the good ol' day of using their Amiga computers!

Well, actually we had all that even before. Just in different ways. IRC, Usenet, mailing lists, Yahoo and similar groups, and of course, a clean(ish) web. Search engines were awkward for most of today's users of course, but we had them too. In the early days of course we had 'Gofer' (Go for this, go for that) instead of the web. Only, the cost of dial-up was limiting things a bit.
:)

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 1:09 pm 
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winstep wrote:
DesertDwarf wrote:
If you don't find the time, then the time will find you. The question is, when it finds you, what will you do?

Not much, I guess, because that means he will be dead, no? ;)

Err.... Yep, pretty much so. ;)
winstep wrote:
DesertDwarf wrote:
I used to work for Softwood, Inc., as their tech support manager. I wrote the last Final Word manual. I handled the tech support account on CompuServe and GEnie. Fun times, indeed.

I love reading about these old 'war' stories. :)

Hey, and we've got the old war wounds to show for it too, haven't we Ric? :P
winstep wrote:
DesertDwarf wrote:
.... Heck, Rics from far-flung locations can even talk to each other and wax poetic while reminiscing about the good ol' day of using their Amiga computers!

I still remember the first time I connected to the Internet using a 9600 baud modem .....

I started programming with the Sinclair computers (Zx-80, Zx Spectrum) when I was still a kid (15-16) and did some truly amazing stuff in Z80 Assembly language for them (imagine a complete BASIC interpreter running on a 3.5 Mhz Spectrum that was even faster than Amstrad's CPC 464 (already very fast) Basic running at 4 Mhz, with built in support for overlapping windows, sprites, wireframe graphics, interrupt procedures, local variables, floating point operations, the whole she-bang).

Unfortunately the Internet was still many years away when that happened, and I was therefore stuck in my little corner of Portugal.

When the Sinclair brand died, I remember looking with envy at the Amiga and Atari STs of the time, but I simply could not afford them. Eventually I started working as a programmer and got myself a 386SX PC at 25 Mhz.

Yeah, always thought you'd started young on something like a Sinclair or Amstrad Jorge! Just had to be something like that for you to be this good. So, old war wounds too, eh? ;)

I started a bit earlier than that, about 78/9, on a Commodore PET! It was a mate's machine that I shared, we both used it for work (we shared premises at the time - estimates, basic bookkeeping, what have you. Programmes were free - everybody used to swap theirs in those days, we both wrote a few utils too and gave them to whoever needed them, so paying for software later on came as something not only of a rude shock but somehow seemed to fundamentally go against the grain.

Then came the first Amiga, the A1000, in 84/5, and my jaws dropped and I was drooling like a dog in a butcher's shop! Finally, in about 87, got hold of an A500 that someone bought for me in the US for about $600 (it was almost double that in the UK) and I was totally blown by the power of this wedge of a thing. Soon after, sold it and got an A1500 that I maxed out and upgraded to OS 2.04, and then saw how I could seriously use an A3000 for photography even (24bit gfx cards!), so went for that too when it came along about 90, while already drooling for a NeXT box.

That came about a year later, got very cheaply through a friend who worked in IT supply and got stuck with a load of surplus from supplying a major corp. who went into them in a big way. First a 'slab' with 17" colour monitor and then soon and rapidly a 'cube' and a tower, both with 21" colour mons. and via the same route. All maxed out! About the same time came internet, and I set up the slab as a NAT box which dialled up at, at first, 16K baud, with the other two NeXT boxes networked to it and the Amigas also networked to each other and the NeXTs. (10Mb ethernet - how quaint that now seems!)

And then in 92 the Amiga 4000 proved irresistible and got added, plus an A1200 later, and when NeXT stopped doing hardware and Commodore started to look very shaky about 93, I started thinking about a PC. But they were so bloody hopeless then, so I waited till about 94 when OS/2 Warp 3 (the Windows-free vers.) came along. Built my first PC then, a 486! Slow bloody beast compared to the Amigas and NeXTs. Even managed to SAMBA that, and even NT 3.51 when I added that, and eventually Solaris. And eventually, the Amigas slowly and sadly went, one after the other, though still at a profit (all totally maxed out and even upgraded to OS 3.1), and then even the NeXT boxes one after the other (though eventually got a slab again, for a drink) as I built a new Pentium machine, and then an AMD one in a massive tower with SCSI Wide and UltraWide, multi-booting Warp 4, Warp 3 for good measure, Solaris, NT4, NeXTSTEP 3.3 x86, and, eventually, experimentally, BeOS, QNX, and even MacOS8 in emulation but sitting on its own disk as well. And in the end of course had to settle on NT4. Sniff!

And now we're stuck with this monster, Win 10! How sad is that? (Though I'm reviving two of my old boxes, an AMD X2 with Win 7 and XP, both in 32 and 64bit flavours, and the other apparently an Athlon, or possibly a K6, which friend found for me hidden in a corner of the shed, on which I might run a few old OSs for fun, like OS/2 Warp, NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP, Solaris, etc.) And I might yet revert to Win 7 on this laptop.

With hindsight (always a fine thing!) I sometimes wish the microchip had never been invented. Come to that, the wheel might not have been such a smart move either. ;)

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Sun Sep 02, 2018 3:46 am 
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Happy Birthday, Ric! :) (Bloody youngster! :P )

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:27 pm 
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Thank you, eldest Ric. Well, on this forum, anyway. My godfather, from whom I borrowed the spelling of Ric that we use, is older than either of us, I'm reasonably sure.


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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Sun Sep 02, 2018 8:49 pm 
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DesertDwarf wrote:
Thank you, eldest Ric. Well, on this forum, anyway. My godfather, from whom I borrowed the spelling of Ric that we use, is older than either of us, I'm reasonably sure.

LOL! Well, he might have been spotty, scraggly teenager when you were born, but I don't think they could be godfathers. ;) (Just guessing - wrong religion, mine is N O N E whatsoever, which I gather is something fairly unacceptable in your part of this little dying planet. ;) )

My spelling of Ric is derived directly from the Old English/Anglo Saxon, 'ric' (ruler), and I pronounce it something like 'reech', though the usual modern Eng. pronunciation is also fine with me. :)

Hope you had a great day.

There's a new preview of a 24hr clock in the 'More on...' thread elsewhere - think I'll do the numbers layers in duplicate for a anti-clockwise as well. Once I've finally decided on the font.

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 8:13 am 
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I was writing this reply to a post in another thread when I realized you hijacked your own thread and thought I should reply here (which was also hijacked, but this will help get it back on track).
nexter wrote:
BTW, nearing the end of a 60 day trial run of DOpus.

nexter wrote:
All in all I've already had to spend far more time than I feel comfortable with familiarising myself with things, and I find it very slow to use because of the limitations of the UI and and layout, even when configured as best as is possible, so I don't think it's for me.

nexter wrote:
Nearly 30 years of being used to that kind of layout etc. and easy, graphical configurability are perhaps just too hard to shake off. :)

When reading this, one word came to mind: ossification.

I'm 51 and have been using computers since mom and dad gave my brother and me a Commodore VIC-20 as a Christmas present in 1979 (for the math-challenged, I was 12). I revel in learning new things, new programs, and adapting. It's what keeps computers so much fun for me. Time marches on and I move on from old programs and old methods. I have less use for DOpus at home (I do use it, of course), but for work purposes, it's a mighty champion of file manipulation and organization, whether managing your music library (Vlad?), your vast collection of photos (like my brother, the pretty decent amateur photographer), or just managing oodles of business files (me...whoopie!).

I don't reference the "first computer at 12" thing to draw a comparison to you or anyone else. I mention it as a reference to all the different systems I've played with over the years. Many I have enjoyed and loved using. A few I regret were not successful (Amiga, BeOS because they could have changed the computing world).

But I moved on. Is Windows the best? Certainly not. If Amiga had survived, our graphics and video processing would be so much more advanced now. If BeOS survived, our OS internal structure would be so amazingly pleasant and clean for programmers and users alike.

The world is full of ifs...and regrets.

For example, I regret that I drove a manual transmission car for one year in my early 30s. Using that clutch with my left foot sped up the process of arthritis (which I was always going to get early as a Larsen Syndrome dwarf) in that hip and made things painful.

But I do not regret, at all, that I strive to move on and use the newer tools and utilities, play the newer games (Gasp! He's a gamer!!1!), enjoy newer books and movies, and play around with newer computer components.

One of my favorite games is Rocket League. There's a fellow in the (very large) Rocket League community named Sunless Khan that makes good videos. Normally, they're instructional with a lot of humor mixed in. The video below is a kind of tribute and meant to be an inspiring one. I think it's pretty stinkin' good.



...and I embrace all of this new-fangled stuff.

In short (pun intended), and especially because my dwarfism makes me acutely aware of orthopedic issues, I try like the dickens to avoid ossification.


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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 2:56 pm 
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DesertDwarf wrote:
I was writing this reply to a post in another thread when I realized you hijacked your own thread and thought I should reply here (which was also hijacked, but this will help get it back on track).

LOL! Yeah, realised I should have posted that here Ric, so here it is now and removed from its wrong place:
nexter wrote:
BTW, nearing the end of a 60 day trial run of DOpus. There's much to like - it's wide-ranging facilities and features, the tabs, and the phenomenal speed of operations. But, and this is a biggie - I miss the convenience of lots of banks of function buttons and other features of old Amiga DOpus 4.12, and I absolutely hate that ghastly configuration, it's a bloomin' nightmare. All in all I've already had to spend far more time than I feel comfortable with familiarising myself with things, and I find it very slow to use because of the limitations of the UI and and layout, even when configured as best as is possible, so I don't think it's for me. I can get things done more quickly with an almost ten years out of date Magellan Explorer or even for that matter running up Amiga DOpus 4.12. Nearly 30 years of being used to that kind of layout etc. and easy, graphical configurability are perhaps just too hard to shake off. :)

DesertDwarf wrote:
nexter wrote:
BTW, nearing the end of a 60 day trial run of DOpus.

nexter wrote:
All in all I've already had to spend far more time than I feel comfortable with familiarising myself with things, and I find it very slow to use because of the limitations of the UI and and layout, even when configured as best as is possible, so I don't think it's for me.

nexter wrote:
Nearly 30 years of being used to that kind of layout etc. and easy, graphical configurability are perhaps just too hard to shake off. :)

When reading this, one word came to mind: ossification.

LOL! Well Ric, that may be the way you see it but that doesn't necessarily make it so. :) I love learning new things and do so all the time (in fact, I'll be starting a PhD thesis on a subject totally removed from any of my professional areas next year, albeit almost entirely via computer as I'm not terribly mobile, so my prof and I will be communicating almost entirely that way), but new is decidedly not always better. And I think DOpus - in line with many other programmes, let alone OSs, in terms of ergonomics and general user-friendliness, has most definitely changed for the worse. And I'm not prepared to spend a month of Sundays to properly learn all the ins and outs of a ruddy file manager. Time's too precious for that, and life too short. When I first used, e.g., the old Amiga DOpus, I had one look at at, read the readme file or something, and within a couple of hours I was away with it and completely comfortable with it. Sure, there were a few things I had to learn as I went along, but it all was easy and simple. And that's what a file manager should be.

Likewise, with Magellan Explorer (initially called Voyager), being very much like the old DOpus. And although it may not have been updated in about a decade, it still works perfectly under Win 7 and is fast as lightning there, though it does have a few issues with Win 10 where it can be a bit slow with some ops (esp. deleting!) So I'll probably try and do most of my file management on the Win 7 system with Magellan once I get that machine fully set up again. (It quad-boots 32 and 64 bit versions of XP and Win 7 and is networked with my laptop, at least, when I'm able to sit at my computer desk which is never for very long due to my disabilities.) Magellan basically still does everything I need it to do, and does so in convenient, easy ways. It'll have to do, at least for now, and it will do so nicely. And not forgetting DOpus 4.12 in emulation - very fast and coping well with Windows disks and large files, thanks of course in large part also to the fantastic WinUAE.
DesertDwarf wrote:
I'm 51 and have been using computers since mom and dad gave my brother and me a Commodore VIC-20 as a Christmas present in 1979 (for the math-challenged, I was 12). I revel in learning new things, new programs, and adapting. It's what keeps computers so much fun for me. Time marches on and I move on from old programs and old methods. I have less use for DOpus at home (I do use it, of course), but for work purposes, it's a mighty champion of file manipulation and organization, whether managing your music library (Vlad?), your vast collection of photos (like my brother, the pretty decent amateur photographer), or just managing oodles of business files (me...whoopie!).

I don't reference the "first computer at 12" thing to draw a comparison to you or anyone else. I mention it as a reference to all the different systems I've played with over the years. Many I have enjoyed and loved using. A few I regret were not successful (Amiga, BeOS because they could have changed the computing world).

But I moved on. Is Windows the best? Certainly not. If Amiga had survived, our graphics and video processing would be so much more advanced now. If BeOS survived, our OS internal structure would be so amazingly pleasant and clean for programmers and users alike.

Hmm, not so sure graphics and video would be so much more advanced now if Amiga had survived. Bear in mind that if, like me, you needed at least 24 bit GFX, all the native GFX were dead. (Although I still love the idea of the Amiga's native 'pullable' screens - very useful in their day and I missed them once I installed GFX cards, though not with the A1200.) On the whole, though in its time Amigas were fabulous systems, to be realistic, first of all the OS needed a complete re-think. It needed proper and serious security, multi-user support, built-in TCP-IP stack and full networking support, inc. built-in NIC, and a more robust file system with full security, protected memory, virtual memory, multi-threading, and much more. It would have meant starting over almost from scratch. And then it would have needed to switch over to Intel/AMD x86 hardware (PowerPC was already dead in the water around the time Commodore went bust as IBM had by then withdrawn from the whole thing apart from its own Power chip for servers etc.), and any form of custom hardware would (or at any rate, should) have been out of the question. (Except perhaps custom 32 bit GFX cards with modernised custom chips.)

As for BeOS - well it had its nice points but also suffered from similar problems to the Amiga's. The OS internals were, to a point, loosely based on BSD, too loosely. It had no security, no file system security, no multi-user support. (Its technology still survives in some set-top boxes, apparently.) Basically, it was a hotch-potch of things, cobbled together with concepts etc. from BSD, Amiga. Mac, and OS/2. Quite fun and easy to use, though. :)

No, what we could and should have had would have been OPENSTEP 5, 6 etc. instead of idiot Jobs bailing out the rotten Apple (they were on the verge of bankruptcy) and turning OPENSTEP into the new MacOS and so severely crippling it to appease Mac users and Mac developers as to make it the pile of useless shite that it is.

OPENSTEP had already accumulated a fairly substantial x86 user base and could have posed a serious challenge to Windows. It had raw unix power combined with complete ease of use and a great look. (In fact, Microsoft licensed parts of the UI for Win 9x and NT 4 and successors. There still there in the form of the taskbar and start menu.)

All in all though it's a good thing - as well as a bad one - that we've only got one single serious OS albeit that being Windows (I don't count 'The Dark Side' - Apple - nor for that matter Linux as serious contenders, they'll always remain a minority sport). If we still had multiple platforms today, can you e.g. imagine the cost of apps? It would be even more ridiculously high than it is.
DesertDwarf wrote:
The world is full of ifs...and regrets.

For example, I regret that I drove a manual transmission car for one year in my early 30s. Using that clutch with my left foot sped up the process of arthritis (which I was always going to get early as a Larsen Syndrome dwarf) in that hip and made things painful.

Ouch, bugger! Sorry to hear Ric. I guess automatics have their uses. Personally, would never have bought one - I always preferred the control of manual and its effectiveness, as well as its much cheaper maintenance and replacement costs. If I were still able to drive today, I'd probably have to buy a 20+ year old banger or a classic car - hate and don't trust any kind of electronics in cars and prefer my old-fashioned small local garage to be able to fix anything cheaply and simply. Hated having to drive a leased automatic when we were living in the Caribbean.

DesertDwarf wrote:
But I do not regret, at all, that I strive to move on and use the newer tools and utilities, play the newer games (Gasp! He's a gamer!!1!)....

In short (pun intended), and especially because my dwarfism makes me acutely aware of orthopedic issues, I try like the dickens to avoid ossification.

LOL! Yeah, where would we be without a sense of humour. And yes, I would agree that ossification is to be avoided at almost any cost, but that doesn't necessarily mean or imply having to embrace all the latest and newest. :)

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 9:52 am 
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winstep wrote:
I started programming with the Sinclair computers (Zx-80, Zx Spectrum) when I was still a kid (15-16) and did some truly amazing stuff in Z80 Assembly language for them (imagine a complete BASIC interpreter running on a 3.5 Mhz Spectrum that was even faster than Amstrad's CPC 464 (already very fast) Basic running at 4 Mhz, with built in support for overlapping windows, sprites, wireframe graphics, interrupt procedures, local variables, floating point operations, the whole she-bang).

Unfortunately the Internet was still many years away when that happened, and I was therefore stuck in my little corner of Portugal.



WOW. Talk about a blast from the past! Look what message I *just* got (and yes, I did indeed author OmniCopy II with a friend - there was never a version 1, btw, we just thought adding a II to it made it look more professional lol):


Dear Jorge

My name is Cristian Cardini. I am 44 years old and I am from Puerto Madryn, a city in southern Argentina.

Back in 1985 I was a user of a ZX Spectrum 48 and one day I received a software called "Vigo Copy 2" from a tourist from Buenos Aires. It was a magical program with which we could copy all the programs and games of the Spectrum. From that day, in partnership with a friend, we began our "business" of selling Spectrum Games. Hehehe

I am writing to tell you that your creation "Omni Copy 2", also called "Vigo Copy 2" crossed the Atlantic Ocean and reached our latitudes to give happiness to a large number of children and adults !!

Although at that time there has not been good economic business for you (no anti-piracy laws), I think you did not imagine that your creation would go so far, and that people like me would remember today as something spectacular.

I hope you are very well. You have a friend in Argentina.

Best regards
Cristian Cardini

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 9:39 pm 
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Wow! Amazing! :)

It's also amazing just how successful the original Sinclair ZX80 (and then ZX81) was in those days. It originally launched here in the UK - after some delay - in 1980 or 81 and was, at first, only advertised in 'The Radio Times' (then the BBC's exclusive radio and TV listings magazine and the UK's best-selling magazine) if memory serves. And then the Spectrum series! Made our C= PET look so outdated and piss poor.

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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Thu Jan 03, 2019 6:24 pm 
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Well, crud. I wish I'd noticed the sooner so I could pass it along to you folks. Today is the last day of a sale for GP Software's Directory Opus. Everything is 40% off.

https://www.gpsoft.com.au/order_intro.html


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 Post subject: Re: Directory Opus
PostPosted: Thu Jan 03, 2019 8:54 pm 
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DesertDwarf wrote:
Well, crud. I wish I'd noticed the sooner so I could pass it along to you folks. Today is the last day of a sale for GP Software's Directory Opus. Everything is 40% off.

https://www.gpsoft.com.au/order_intro.html

I didn't go with it anyway, Ric. Made me too slow, hate the config... Nope, it's off the system for over a month now and I doubt I'll see it again in a hurry. Life's too short to spend too much time on such things. :)

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