-----Original Message-----
From: Rosemarie Chavarria
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2016 11:53 PM
To: nvda@groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] This is the moderator speaking: Question Regarding Eloquence for NVDA from Code Factory

Hi, David,

I remember those dos days too. I went to a program called ROP which stands for regional occupation program and we used those old computers too. I remember those old 7-inch floppy disks. One had a program called word rap and the one on the right drive had the actual program of a word processing program on it. That was when the drives were side by side instead of one on top and one on the bottom.

Rosemarie

-----Original Message-----
From: David Moore [mailto:jesusloves1966@...]
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2016 8:49 PM
To: nvda@groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] This is the moderator speaking: Question Regarding Eloquence for NVDA from Code Factory

Hi guys,
I remember those good-old days well. When I went to college in the 80's, I had the 720 KB floppy disks. I had DOS, a synthesizer, and a Pascal interpreter on one of those floppies. I remember when Ohio State got a few IBM AT's with a 1 meg hard drive, and one could put everything imaginable on it. MS then thought that one would never need more than a few meg for everything they had. Windows OS sure changed all of that for sure. Also, computer programs were very concise then. The programmer tried to have as few lines of code as possible so that space would be conserved. Now, because of all the room we have on our systems, programmers have many lines of code that is not necessary. Teachers who said to write only one page made it much harder for me to summarize everything in that little bit of space. I would imagine that it was harder for programmers in the 80's to summarize everything in as few lines of code as possible. We do have way more room than we need. Also, videos and audio files could be made much more compressed if people did not expect HD video quality and the best audio quality. You brought back a lot of good memories. Jobs for the blind were plentiful in computers in the dos days, because everything was text and command driven instead of a five year old being able to point at an icon and click. Many more people can use the computer, but it has made it harder for the blind to use new computers. It seems like technology is trying to make everything easier and easier for the sighted, but at the same time, it makes it much more adventurous for the blind. But there is a lot of good that has come out of this. Artificial intelligence will enable the blind to do many tasks in the next ten years like driving a car. We have to look at the glass half full and look toward a totally different future than we had in the 80's. Thanks for some good memories. Take care.


-----Original Message-----
From: Shaun Everiss
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2016 8:41 PM
To: nvda@groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] This is the moderator speaking: Question Regarding Eloquence for NVDA from Code Factory

To be honest you'd be surprised what I had back in the day.
While I didn't use windows 3.11 or anything, I had wordprefect 5.1 though didn't use it much as I had a keynote gold 1850 and used keysoft
1 and mastertouch 1 for my work.
I had a 80mb drive then when that died a 60 mb drive.
I was able with drivespace from dos 6.22 to compress the drive to round 110-130mb and then ran compressed.
On that drive, I had wordprefect with documents, dos 6.22, a coppy of norton utilities 7 later upgraded to 8.
quarterdec expanded memmory manager version 8.0, several games and interpriters to run them, at least 5mb worth of utilities some made in house by someone I knew at the time.
And I still had space.
I knew friends that had old office 4, works version 2, several games, in fact most of the 500mb drive they had was games, both for windows and dos.
a cd drive, and soundblaster etc.
What you must remember is that 125mb was actually quite a lot.
The biggest programs were never more than 10-20mb however, remember that dialup stuff means that 1-5mb was rather big in those days.
Your os was on 3 disks and if you had the suplimentals 4.
My toshiba had its own utilities disk and origional os disk.
all 1.44mb ofcause wordperfect came on 6 720kb disks.
2 disk for the printer.
1 for the dictionary.
1 for the printer program.
1 for the wordperfect program itself.
1 for the graphics components
1 for the installers, utilities, graphics drivers, basic graphics files, text driver, and fonts.
The installer also created all the network files itself, modified My compressed 110mb drive actually had a lot on it though 95% of it was for fun I even had x tree gold.
The thing with the modern system is that everything got bigger once windows became its own opperating system and not a dumb dos shell.
True programs were written for it but even so.
Up to windows 98 in fact windows did still use a stripped down version of dos, each version having less and less.
Windows me had a really stripped down version of dos that with a little hacking you could be made to access.
From windows 2000 on windows was its own os though the nt based os we all know and love now existed it was for network users.
configurations etc.
The major advantage with the 9x systems was you could run just about everything or anything and the system would not care.
Ofcause you didn't have the driver library for things like flash drives and the like and usb support in fact didn't exist when win95 came out but even so I kinda liked it.
No intercepts, and no real issue.
Later on with all the security protection etc that came with windows, you got a lot of broken chains and issues with screenreaders running together and uninstalling and the like.
You could do it if you knew what you were doing but it was unstable.
If you screwed up, then you could redo the chain but you would have to reload the display and start again and then or reformat which is what happened whenever I forgot to run things in the right order or at once which was easy to do hotkeys and all.
With the dcm mirror system you can't do this anymore because its all library driven.
And with uia now you definately can not cause any real issue.
That may actually be one change and only a reason that would get me to upgrade to another os though the mirror system works just fine.
Ofcause with nvda and things that directly access the components of the windows os all those off screen models and the like are bypassed though you can loose some vertual modes and the stuff for some of the access things have changed.
Programs are relying on web components for starters and thats where it is at.
Eventually we may se an os based on the web and as long as that is accessible it may not be that bad.



On 20/04/2016 11:41 a.m., David Moore wrote:

Hi,
With a 125 meg hard drive, how can you even have any programs or
documents on there? Do you back them up to a floppy disk?


From: Carlos
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 7:11 PM
To: nvda@groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] This is the moderator speaking: Question Regarding
Eloquence for NVDA from Code Factory

Hello Again:

A description of my PC:



*Packard Bell Legend V

*386SX 16MHz Processor

*125 Megabyte Hard Disk

*EGA Video Card

*14 Inch Monitor

*Sound Blaster I Sound Card

*101 PS/2 Keyboard/Logitech Three Button Mouse w/Rubber Ball on
Bottom


*Windows 3.11/MS DOS 6.22

*Norton Commander 5, Microsoft Office Professional

*NVDA 5.x




Long live the 90's!!!


*


On 4/18/2016 3:27 PM, Brian Vogel wrote:

Rosemarie Chavarria wrote, in regard to a friend of hers who
insisted on staying with WinXP, "I asked him why and his answer was
that it was simpler to work with."

And I can't count the times I've heard this, about way more than
Windows, and thought, "No, it's not easier to work with - it's what
you're used to." Win XP was an OS I loved and Microsoft has the
annoying habit of alternating "good" and "bad" versions of Windows.
The number of things that require manual intervention from the user in
XP is huge compared to later versions, particularly Windows 7 forward.
And, when it comes down to it, even in the "ugly" versions of Windows
the similarities to their predecessors is at least as strong as the
differences, but the differences are where people are required to learn something new.

David Moore's comments regarding those who live to be 100, or near
it, really resonate with me. My grandmother died in the 1990s and was
in her 90s at the time. When I think about what technology was at her
birth and the amount of change she and her age cohort had to go through I am amazed.
I don't know if I could be as flexible as they were. While the pace
of change has picked up, particularly in the cyber world, the majority
of changes I've lived through (I'm just short of 54 years old) feel to
me much more like refinements on very familiar themes rather than
complete divergences from what came before. That was not true for my
grandparents at all, and my parents experienced more revolutionary
changes than I have, too. I think my only two revolutions were the
introduction of the personal computer and the ascendance of the internet.

Brian