Deliberately provocative use of the term 'disabled' in the headline. When you drill down into what is really going on, it is far more understandable.

Hi Jarred. Congratulations on the acquisition! Did (or will) your investors make any profit on what they put into Bun?

This smells unbelievably dodgy

What applications and workflows were these workstations typically used for?

The thought of a runaway thermal reaction in a cell that’s sitting in your ear, albeit a small one, is pretty sobering.

Oh bless you and your youngsterness. A and B, by convention, were reserved for floppy drives and C was typically the first hard drive.

On systems with a single floppy, drives A: and B: were two logical drives mapped to the same physical drive. This enabled you to (tediously) copy files from one diskette to another.

I don't recall this, and I do recall running something like "diskcopy A: A:" to do that operation.

phantom drive B is explicitly mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_...

the linked source checks out. diskcopy will also do this for you if you give it source = dest.

Hard drives were a luxury.

While original IBM PCs indeed may not have had HDDs, it did become a standard for PC XT, as early as 1983. Only the cheapest version were without a HDD by the end of the 1980s.

Many clones came without a HDD.

Sure, I can imagine that.

My first contact with PCs was in 1988 and they all had HDDs and were definitely not "IBM PC" but clones. That said, that's just my experience so YMMV.

My first PC, bought in late 1986, was a Leading Edge Model D, with two 360K floppy drives and no hard drive. I wrote a script to put COMMAND.COM and some other key files on a RAM disk on boot so I didn't have to keep the DOS floppy in the A: drive all the time. IIRC they had come out with a model that had a 20 MB hard drive but it was more than I could afford.

MIT, where I was at school then, had some IBM PC XTs with 10 MB hard drives, but most of their computer resources were time-sharing DEC VAX machines. You could go to one of several computer labs to get on a terminal, or even dial into them--I did the latter from my PC (the one above) using a 2400 baud modem, which was fast for the time.

Reminds me of a silly thing that happened when I was a freshman in high school, ca. 1992.

We had a dumb "computer literacy" class taught in an computer lab full of PS/2 Model 25s with no hard drives, and were each issued a bootable floppy disk containing both Microsoft Works and our assignment files (word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc.), which we turned in at the end of class for grading.

We started Works in the usual way, by typing "works" at the MS-DOS prompt.

One day, out of boredom, I added "PROMPT Password:" to AUTOEXEC.BAT on my disk, changing the DOS prompt from "A:\>" to "Password:" when booted from my disk.

Two days later, I got called into the dean's office, where the instructor demanded to know how I used my disk to "hack the network" — a network that, up until this point, I didn't even know existed, as the lab computers weren't connected to anything but power — and "lock me out of my computer", and threatened suspension unless and until I revealed the password.

After a few minutes trying to explain that no password existed to a "computer literacy" instructor who clearly had no idea what either AUTOEXEC.BAT or the DOS prompt was, nor why booting a networked computer from a potentially untrustworthy floppy disk was a terrible idea, I finally gave in.

"Fine. The password is works. Can I go now?"

Those 10mb full-height mfm drives were so slow... you could literally turn the computer on... go make yourself something to drink, finish your first cup, pour a second and you'd be getting the to DOS prompt right around the time it finished booting.

The irony, it was actually faster doublespaced/stacked.

Keep in mind that a lot of this depends on the location.

In Russia, we had class full of IBM PCs without hard drives in school - you had to juggle floppies - and that was early 90s. And that was a fancy school.

By the end of the 1980s, a lot of years had passed, and you’d buy an AT instead of an XT.

If anything I’m appalled precisely because I _do_ support the goals of the initiative! So I think you’ve got your thinking a little mixed up there.

What a terrible choice of character to represent the goals of this movement! I do wonder if the person who chose it was actually alive at the time of Clippy and fully understands how hated it really was. The idea anyone would want to “be like clippy” is utterly laughable to many of my generation.

The person who started the movement (Louis Rossman) was and does. The person who made this website maybe wasn't and does not. The phrase "be like Clippy" really doesn't fit what the "movement" is about and seems to be the source of the confusion on this thread.

The choice of Clippy makes sense if you watch the original video. It's not suggesting that Clippy is something we should strive for again. It's meant to show that while we thought Clippy was horrible and anti-user then, just compare it to what we have now. Clippy wasn't "good", but infinitely more harmless in comparison.

When it comes to the evals for this kind of thing, is there a standard set of test data out there that one can work with to benchmark against? ie a collection of documents with questions that should result in particular documents or chunks being cited as the most relevant match.

Yes check out haiku-rag benchmarks and evaluations

But the parent poster wasn’t recommending a script or a configuration, they were sharing a really easy way to do it by clicking a checkbox in the Settings App.