If I recall, MSDN was super expensive but that is because it included non-commercial licenses for just about everything Microsoft shipped as well as getting hard copies of the documentation and a bunch of other stuff.
If you just wanted to do c++ windows programming you can get visual studio which, I believe, did come with Win32 documentation (especially as CD roms became common distro methods).
The c++ software development kit itself (just libraries, documentation, and samples, no tooling) wasn't too expensive and was mainly material costs.
I always drool over those paper documents. Imagining myself getting into some underground facility due to WW3 and hacking on some old computers reading those manuals is one of my comforts.
The run at home was in the context of $2k/mo. At that price you can get your money back on self-hosted hardware at a much more reasonable pace compared to 20/mo (or even 200).
I think the Colossus[1] predated the ENIAC but is still in line with your general theme of doing stuff for the military. In this case it was used for cipher breaking, not firing calculations.
You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory: "A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete."
You say that but they rewrote the start menu and task bar from scratch. Something you see cried for over and over again by folks who think that rewriting is easy.
The end result is a painful, inflexible, and overly opinionated piece of UI that is slowly re-learning lessons learned by it's fore barer and is likely to never be as capable of what it replaced. From beta people wanted to resize and reposition it and that feature is still nowhere to be seen after 5 years (including public preview).
I have little to no confidence that the develpers currently in the Windows org can, collectively, build their way out of this in any time frame that feels reasonable.
I have faith that rewrite was done because some exec told them to do it, rather that out of a desire to make a better start menu. The result is shoddy work from someone who clearly didn't want to do it, and got told 'no' when they had ideas which would genuinely improve the experience.
I worked in the windows org around that time and the Dev/QA ratio there was closer to 1:1. QA did both manual testing and much of the automation, quality gates, and did regression testing against older versions of windows. Given the complexity of the product is is fairly easy for an inexpensive change to require an expensive test effort.
For this logic I like to point out that every AI service has text that says, essentially "AI can be wrong, double check your answers". If you had the same disclaimer on your food "This food's quality is not assured" would you feel comfortable buying it or would you take pause until you've built up trust with the seller and manufacturer.
There's so much CYA because there is an A that needs C'ing
GLM itself is quite inexpensive. A year sub to their coding plan is only $29 and works with a bunch of various tools. I use it heavily as a "I don't want to spend my anthropic credits" day-to-day model (mostly using Crush)
I uninstall the gemini app and disable the google app. It seems they are heavily linked so remmoving it may do the trick. As a practice I don't use any google apps if I can find a good replacement so I am not sure if messages is impacted.
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