16-bit Intel 8088 chip (c. 1985)

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_(novel)

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).

The 1581 had some amount of MFM diskette compatibility.

My favorite Bukowski quote is: 'To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.'

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...

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.