> What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a
race?
> [Audience reply: Sprinter]
> Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay?
> [Audience laughter]
> But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint.
That brings back memories. I did almost exactly the same thing, but I created a Postscript program to render a "Common Seal" stamp, that through some process unknown to me could be converted from the printout to an actual stamp. It was all circular, the text was rendered on a path (a circle) and automatically scaled to fit. I used a lot of paper writing that, I went a little further and moved the image to different positions on the page so I could get more than four tests on a page, but still a large amount of paper in the end. I'd forgotten about the Microsoft Word special style that made it all possible.
So when I got to use a NextStation with Preview.app, that was a huge revelation, interactive postscript.
So maybe being a bit pedantic here, but the Atari ST was originally going to use CP/M 68k, but part way through development they changed the base OS from that to what was more of a MS-DOS clone (which as others have said was also mainly a CP/M 80 clone). I think this was done to have better compatibility with the GEM layer, so the Atari ST OS, TOS, was more like MS-DOS than CP/M.
It would be interesting to port TOS (or more likely EmuTOS) to this 68k IBM PC and kind of go full circle.
As a parent myself, I'd like to say that it's not that easy. There are measures you can take, but it doesn't always work.
The web is maybe easy to control, but what about all the other means of communication kids have now, like in-game social tools? In the end that comes down to do you ban everything that could cause an issue, and then you are isolating your child from their friends.
Even if that issue is solved, I've heard stories of kids 'forcing' other kids to watch porn on phones at school. How do you prevent that one? Most often the other parents are unaware, don't care, or even provide the porn.
I used to get Byte magazine back then. The cover date was three months in the past by the time I got it. Before the internet the News section was still relevant even after three months. Some books I ordered took 6 months if they arrived at all.
Plus the Apple //e (January 1993) had 80 columns and lower case, which coupled with the disk drive made it useful for business. But I guess the IBM PC (August, 1991) already had all that by then (and the Apple ///, November 1990).
Actually 80 column cards[1] were a pretty routine thing in II+ machines from early 1980 on. Those and the Microsoft Z80 CP/M card were more or less the standard "business computer" until the IBM arrived. These got you full ASCII and lower case support, and ran things like WordStar and VisiCalc as well as anything on the market.
It wasn't until 83 or 84 that the XT/AT "lots of memory and hard drive as standard" configuration drove DOS software (c.f. Wordperfect, Lotus, Turbo Pascal) farther than the IIe could reach. The Apple spent an absolutely shocking amount of time as "the best computer to buy" for a working professional. It really was way ahead of its time.
[1] The Videx Videoterm was most popular, but there were many clones. These were all based on the MC6845 controller with their own framebuffer RAM. In essence they were mostly identical to the IBM MDA card, though without the special character attributes and high-bit graphics characters.
You know what would help with this, if the click rectangle updates were delayed, maybe by 1 second, after the UI updates. Then if you were already aiming for a button when it moves, you'd still tap it.
