Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Great Upgrapes of History: Upgrades that Weren't

Everybody has their favorite stories of the upgrape that either had major bugs; was slow, bloated or both; had reduced functionality; or didn't work at all.

Some perennial favorites from the mists of the past:
Special award:
  • anything from Microsoft x.0 (but let's be fair, lots of other companies could compete for this one!)
Add your "favorites"!

1 comment:

RonZ said...

Novell Netware 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 (which explains why nobody runs Novell anymore, doesn't it?)

I'm not sure if the original pentium chip (you know, the one that couldn't, uhm, do math) is an upgrape or not.

Mac OS X 10.0, 10.1, 10.2. OSX was, of course, a x.0 release. We expect problems. So they tried to fix it. Twice. And failed twice. These weren't really bug fixes. They were, in fact, new and enhanced bugs. By 10.3, it was still not great, but at least it didn't crash that often. (But yes, the whirling color wheel of death is much prettier than the blue screen of death. Pretty much the same effect, but Mac is prettier even when it's crashing! Now that, friends, is a sense of aesthetics!)

But I don't know why we're singling out technology. I mean, isn't Jesus himself an upgrape. Supposed to emphasize love and caring more than the previous version of God. (For documentation on the bugs in the previous versions, see Sodom, Lot's wife, Job, or the binding of Isaac.) And, in version 1.0, this upgrade seemed to work. But somewhere in the dark ages, we got the Crusades, followed by the Inquisition.

As a matter of fact, I'm hereby proposing that we rename Pope Urban II, who called the first crusade, to Pope Upgrape I!