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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

    For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

    Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

    • A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
    • a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
    • followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
    • a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)





  • I suppose the weird surprise lesson of the Windows 8 fiasco is no matter how badly they bollixed it up, they wouldn’t lose enough customers that they could afford break a lot more of the user experience than they ever originally thought.

    Even Vista, while people had issues*, still provided a largely familiar interface and didn’t go out of its way to break muscle memory and traditional workflows.

    IMO, Vista wasn’t as bad as is commonly held. A lot of the problem was that it was more resource-intensive than previous systems-- it really asked for decent graphics cards and 2Gb memory, but they sold a lot of cheap machines with 512Mb and crappy shared-memory chipsets that only qualified as “Vista Basic Capable” so that the manufacturers wouldn’t have to formally declare them obsolete. Some drivers had teething trouble, but switching to 64 bit was going to have growing pains anyway.