Everyone should own at least one book of Bukowski poetry: in addition to computers he wrote about cats, going to the track, drinking and other things his life. I remember riding the train from Dresden to Prague and the person next to us was reading his novel Post Office which is a wonderful story of irresponsibility.
Reading Bukowski often makes me yearn for a life that could have been. An often miserable, always irresponsible, but often wonderful life. Of course, his real life was probably far less glamorous than he makes it sound, but, man, did he have a way with words.
I never knew about this poem. It's a factual observation of that era of computing.
To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).
I still freakin' love the Tandy 2000 because it was an absolute beast compared to most of the competition at the time—a true workstation class machine at an affordable price for 1983. Yes, it was doomed to fail in the coming PC-clone onslaught. So were a lot of machines.
It pops up every few months or so on here, and I have to upvote it every time.
I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.
I used to read a lot of Bukowski. I still have a very large number of his books, rare and out of print, stored in boxes.
At first, I thought this was a well-written parody. I never had one inkling about this poem or his technical knowledge. I understand what he was talking about because I was around back then and understand and suffered from these gotchas.
I was curious about what was happening with the domain name here (after all, shkspr.mobi has nothing to do with Shakespeare) so imagine my delight at discovering it was an actual poem and my vague notion that I’ve been to the site for poetry in the past was, in fact, correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_(novel)
Shout out to City Lights Bookstore in San Fancisco. I bought a lot of poetry books there in the late 80s and early 90s.
To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).
I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.
You can read the full letter from which this quote was taken, along with a short bio, here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/12/charles-bukowski-j...
At first, I thought this was a well-written parody. I never had one inkling about this poem or his technical knowledge. I understand what he was talking about because I was around back then and understand and suffered from these gotchas.