Tom WalkerMastodon: the only social network with more Windows 3.1 users than Windows 11 users
I know no one wants to give Windows any credit, but Windows 3.1 was the golden age of computing. The last prelapsarian (that is, pre-internet) era of the PC.
Brian DearHeresy. NeXTStep was the golden age of computing.
@brianstorms If we're looking at it as an era, it's kinda the same time? (Early 90s)
Indeed, all the more reason why NeXTStep towers over any version of Winders. Same early 90s era.
One was brilliant, forward-looking, setting the standard all the way to today. The other was a hack built by a hack company only interested in empire, and led by pirates (“embrace, extend, erode”) incapable of innovation. imho 😉
@brianstorms Yeah but you needed a $10,000 computer! My Win 3.1 computer was free (rescued from the skip)
@tomw In 1988 sure but that changed quickly. By early 90s there were cheaper NeXT machines and NeXTStep ran on Intel PCs too.
(Heck, we had a 1988-era AST Premium 386 w/ 340MB drive and 7MB RAM that, altogether, cost ~$10,000 and then we had to buy SCO Xenix to run on it.)
Sören@brianstorms @tomw spoken like someone who hasn’t used Macintosh System 7!
Sure, I used System 7 on secondary machines at work but I was already spoiled by NeXTStep.
When I'd gotten a NeXTcube around 1990, it just blew Macs away in every way shape and form, and I stayed in NeXTStep as my main desktop OS for years, eventually migrating to a Canon Object.station (pizza box running NeXTStep for Intel) until MacOS X came out circa 2001. MacOS X was essentially NeXTStep with some Mac "flair" and I was ok making the switch, and I'm still using that today.