Again this is from dictation.
Thank you for your reply. Now I have a better understanding of what you intend to do with your computer and your software projects. I wish to commend you for having made very good progress in understanding how different operating systems function. Just because things have not turned out completely the way you want should not be considered to be a failure. Your learning experience has been a success because it is brought to this bar and you have come to ask others to help you.
There are many who are able and willing to help you. However, you need to understand that those who have more experience than you also have some words of question about the message you may approach.
Rather than talking about my own history of studying computers as both a profession and a hobby, let me turn to another form of human communication. I wish to make reference to what we call a metaphor, parable or illustration. These are methods we humans use to convey ideas that are difficult to express in technical terms but we know to be basically true. Oftentimes these ideas are presented as fables or myths involving animal behavior or some type of unusual human behavior. These stories are use to help reinforce ideas about good choices and bad choices that people make.
Some of these stories encourage people to keep on trying even when it seems there is no answer to a problem. In many cases persistence does pay off for the individual that is patient. Thomas Edison claimed that his success was more about persistence rather than genius.
Other parables so are metaphors show how sometimes humans can go too far and too extreme in trying to bring about a desired result. Such stories illustrate how it may be foolish to keep on exploring something that will not result in a happy ending.
Another group of stories often used are about how compromises bring about results that are usable even though they are not ideal. Sometimes it is difficult for us to let go of our ideals and except a compromise solution. Yet human experience has shown that oftentimes that is the best course of action.
Now for my metaphor I am going to talk about the experience of the railroad industry. Now I am not going to talk about the greed of the railroad industry, nor am I going to talk about the huge success of the railroad industry. No, I wish to talk about a specific problem that did occur that was hard to resolve until a compromise was made. But the compromise did not really eliminate the problem. It was a compromise and nothing more or less than that. But it was necessary.
My source for this is from an article in Wikipedia about the history of the Australian railroad industry. As you know, Australia is a very large area with people concentrated in a few scattered cities mostly along the ocean. The railroad industry was successful in time together the distant places of Australia and contributed much to the success of Australia today. However, there was a very big problem at one time. Here is a quotation .
The colonial railways were built to three different gauges, which became a problem once lines of different systems met at Albury in 1881 and Wallangarra in 1888. In the 20th century, the lines between major cities were converted to standard gauge and electrified suburban networks were built in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. In the second half of the 20th century, many rural branch lines were closed to passenger traffic or altogether in all states.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_Australia
I am using this essay metaphor to persuade you to accept the success you already have and to recognize you have taken the issue about a sparse you need to go. You have come up with a way to boot for completely different operating systems by making a simple compromise. Your compromise was to use another boot media that can be removed and replaced. Specifically, the floppy drive. You can also use an optical disc the same way. Linux will boot off of a optical disc very well and runs very well. Windows 10 can be made to boot from a USB drive and it will perform quite well. So you already have a compromise solution to your problem.
What you are trying to do now is unify everything into one solution that would allow you to boot any operating system without the need to use replaceable media. It can be done, but the cost of time and energy is too much.
Now let me go back to my metaphor. The problem the railroad industry had was not with locomotives. It was not with passenger cars. Nor was the issue about how rails are made. Nor was it anything to do with the size of the wheels use on the cars. The issue was the gauge. The gauge is the spacing between the rails. It has to be exact, a small variation is not tolerable. Any attempt to make some kind of a system that would automatically adjust to differences in rail spacing leads to an enormous investment of time and energy and materials into something that never will work right. The solution to the railroad problem was to simply standardize one gauge for use in the entire country. This meant that some equipment had to be either scrapped or repaired or modified. Large stretches of railway had to be readjusted to meet the new standard. And even after doing that there still was a lot of passenger cars and freight cars that did not conform to the new standard. They either had to be scrapped or modified. There was no easy solution.
Now what I'm trying to say in this metaphor is that the Apple company, the Microsoft company, and the Intel company did not at first try to work together to make something unified. After a period of time there was some work that eventually resulted in some kind of an agreement among these manufacturers about how a personal computer should work. These standards are now the basis for designs of new computers. However, these new standards did not make the old computers compatible with the new standards. Nor is there an easy way to convert the old computers to conform to the new standards. It's just too hard. No, I do not say impossible. Is just not a practical thing to do. New computers nowadays are 64-bit computers and the firmware and software is designed to run a 64-bit operating system that has the security and power needed for modern-day personal computers. Trying to convert an older computer to conform to the newer operating systems is just not worthwhile.
I hope you understand my use of a metaphor to illustrate the idea of accepting a compromise and not trying to work any further on something that is very difficult do.
This is the end of dictation.