Dava's Hitchhiker's Guide to 'End of Life' ..so long and thanks for all the chips!

[Here is a lighthearted look at 'End Of Life' known also as EOL, when a product moves from the support phase to a coffin somewhere in the ethernets of a Skyrim graveyard.. or no longer supported by the manufacturing company, while this is not always the worst thing ever to have happened in existence.. try paying £4000-12000 for a MacPro and tell me in 6-10 years if you feel like a little cry :'(

Now please listen to the hitchhiker's guide music, and have a reasonably astute voice in you head, for the duration of the proceedings. ~ahthankyou]


Once upon a time in the 1970's of 'earth' The Planetial Conglomeration Interstellarfractuation, also known to the locals as IBM, realized once consumers worked out that the original company that sold them their 'Till device', was then responsible to help them use it for a unlimited number of years, they became aware & alarmed this was going to be all too costly.. negating the disastrous PR problems that occurred with a Till that tallied the wrong outcome this would come second and third place.. oh my!

By the 1980's every major company had just assumed the humans were stupid and would accept; 'when a new model comes out we stop supporting the old one' and many stupid humans did, even though they paid the same price for a system as you would for a kidney on the black market, they just said 'okay' and bought the new model.

Two companies did not think they should be so mean to the stupid humans.. IBM and Apple, in the early 80's it was IBM offering extended support, and in the mid-80s to 1990's it was Apple giving up to 6 years EOL support, today Apple offers 6 years half-life support, with a full life of 10.

One may note another.. Clive Sinclair, whose systems he made sure were backward compatible.. possibly the first human to do this on a whole range of computers, and so risk losing money.

By 1995 the idea you had support what-ever-on-earth you were selling had caught on, and people would get quite cross ..if you sold them junk and disappeared to china they would report you to Interpol because they would have nerd-rage if something didn't work *exactly* as stated!

By 2000's graphic chip vendors, became proud of their place within the community, offering much laxed policies on RMA and EOL, even cards from those eras still receive support today.

*

Don't let the talking whale delude you, all of this was hard fought, with many angry letters about amps and millivolts .. usb ports with strange colors that no one knew what they meant.

In history there has been many strange occurrences of faulty goods, like the hypnotic vacuum cleaner incident of 2070, where as you know, many people where convinced that cleaner was working but in-fact it had no motor and only a MP3 player and a speaker... or the woeful tale in 2102 of the faulty electric massage underwear, .. so many lives lost, they will be missed.

People enjoy knowing who to trust.. now if you just pop in the scales and I'll warm up the probe..
.. ohw you *have* lost weight, must be all the seaweed we feed you. .. its vibrating .. oh! i think that means its ready..

notes----
*Shixxor of Reddit's Flying Whale. great artist!