9fans archive / 1998 / 11 / 69 /    prev next

From: Russ Cox rsc@pla...
Subject: [9fans] DMR's OS :(
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:18:37 -0500

> My organizer has never crashed on me, and I've had it since before Unix
> existed. It does OCR without having to learn someone's handwriting,
> voice recognition, supports I18N, has almost unlimited storage capacity,
> and an easy-to-use (actually, invisible) OS/GUI.  It requires no batteries
> and has survived several collisions against concrete, ice and skulls.
> I've never forgotten it, needed to back it up, swapped the hardware or
> patched the software.  Hopefully, I never will.

That's strange.  I've had quite a different experience.
Mine is a newer model, ten years younger than Unix.      
It requires daily down time or it mostly stops functioning.  
Proper (and frequent!) care and feeding is essential as 
well, unlike (say) a Palm Pilot that lasts three months 
on a single set of batteries.

Despite the almost unlimited storage capacity, throughput
is comparatively (and frustratingly!) small.  Long-term data
loss is increasingly a problem and it doesn't come with ECC
memory.  Computational power is annoyingly limited;   
it would be nice if there were an upgrade kit to add
a couple extra processors.

Russ