Wonder (was Re: just outta curiosity)

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Sun Apr 8 16:21:20 2001

I don't recall exactly when it was, but I not too long ago I found myself
dealing with the "tediousness" of using a computer. To consider a computer
tedious was, for me, such a shock that I had to ponder the implications of
that. The result of that pondering was that for my tools, I needed them to
work correctly and they rarely were, and getting them fixed was tedious.
However I also realized that for the "PC" at least a lot of the wonder had
gone out of computers. I remember clearly the FORTRAN printout that
computed the impact point of a free falling object dropped from 5,000 feet
in a uniform gravity gradient and a perfect vacuum :-) I printed x & y
co-ordinates of the object for every tenth second and got 20 pages or so of
numbers. That was WONDERful. Writing a PL/I program to use overstrikes to
print multi-shaded histograms on a line printer attached to a 370 was
pretty fun to.

Figuring out what my graphics program on Win98 wasn't seeing mouse events
was TEDIOUS.

So much of my motivation is driven by the wonder of what the system can do
with what it has that I find VAXen and PDP-11s much more impressive than
1.5Ghz Pentium IVs. Capturing the wonder is my secret ingredient to learning.

--Chuck
Received on Sun Apr 08 2001 - 16:21:20 BST