At 05:16 pm 13/08/2001 -0400, Douglas Quebbeman wrote:
>
>For me, it should be a date to *mourn*, not to celebrate.
Hmm, I'm going to have to disagree with you now...
<snip>
>
>But I digress. While he was doing this, I was looking
>around the store, and saw the Doom of Computing in the
>form of a computer that didn't require a soldering iron
>to build and use- namely, an Apple II.
I think all of us have our own personal view on "when computing had it's
golden age". For me, 1984 and the Sinclair QL was the peak of the
microcomputer (as opposed to the IBM PC & clones). For you, it must have
been around 197<mumble>.
>The beginning of the end. I knew it then, and I was
>proved right.
I dispute that: Computers and computing go from strength to strength.
There's more than just PCs out there; the mighty mainframe still rules the
roost in many places, there's Apple Macs, VAX minis, Crays, and probably
many others I can't even think of. And, for the soldering-iron fans,
embedded computing is probably stronger than it ever was - *everything's*
got a computer or three in it...
>Again, it's nice to have fast, cheap
>computers, but I for one would have been just as
>happy for the next 20 years having fast, cheap TERMINALS
>to hook to the mainframes. And the continued high cost of
>entry would have kept from coming into existence an entire
>generation of self-taught (and poorly so) programmers who
>have and continue to crank out some of the worst software
>imaginable. In the halcyon days, most of the bad code was
>writtwn by the lusers themselves...
That's a bit elitist, isn't it? Besides, most of the self-taught
programmers of whom you speak are not really programmers; they're merely
users with enough knowledge to be dangerous. Besides, if it wasn't for the
microprocessor and all that it begat, this list wouldn't even be here...
>Easy access to fast, cheap computers drove the genesis of
>an entire generation of self-taught programmers who didn't
>give a whit for structured programming or anything else that
>resembles a methodology, and who single-handedly changed the
>expectations that managers have about how quickly things
>get done. Sure RAD helped speed programming along, but not
>nearly as much just cutting corners... which the PC made
>easier... damn, I feel a song coming on again:
It wasn't the PC that made cutting corners easy; it was the near-universal
use of BASIC - a fundamentally unstructured language - that is responsible
for the bulk of the "bad programmers"; and I say that as a professional
programmer who uses BASIC....!
Maybe if PASCAL had been the language de jour, today's self-taught
programmers would be better at it...
>No, not only will I not celebrate it, but I need to
>find a black armband to wear the rest of the month.
IMHO, no. The PC had to happen; it was just a case of who got lucky (or had
the best marketing). At the end of the day, the PC offered unrivalled
expansion possibilities, a comparatively friendly OS (Gates did well to
poach DOS), and good flexibility thanks to the lack of built in anything.
Personally, I'd have liked to have seen a MC68000 based machine become
today's PC (mainly because I'd already learned assembler on the QL). No
doubt Commodore fans would have preferred the C128 or Amiga to "grow up"
into the PC.
Well, I'm off to dabble with my CBM PET, or maybe the MZ-80K. They're fun,
but I wouldn't like to have to use them every day, day in day out...
Cheers!
Ade.
--
B-Racing: B where it's at :-)
http://www.b-racing.co.uk
Received on Mon Aug 13 2001 - 20:34:11 BST