Nuke Redmond!

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Tue Jan 16 07:49:17 2001

> I don't know why Intuit has survived, but I am kind of curious given the
> boneheadedness of the product. I mean everybodies first two programs are,
> hello world, then checkbook. Granted they have put more than a little
> polish on Checkbook 1.0, but they have also managed to drag it out over 9
> major releases.

Being a bad seed, my first program printed out random vulgar phrases
instead of "hello world". This was on a CDC-6500 running Dual-MACE at
Purdue University.

My next two programs were a program to compute the dynamic compliance
of a tonearm, and another to compute, based on the native resonant
frequency of a driver (speaker), and the proposed dimensions of a room
to be constructed, the frequencies where the bass would resonate in
the room, and the distribution of the nodes (antinodes?). Over a two-
week period, I coded these programs in CDC-6000 Series BASIC, CDC-6000
Series Fortran, and our local port of Niklaus Wirth's Pascal Compiler.

Eventually, I bought Electric Checkbook for the Macintosh, a great
program I rarely used due to extra work of maintaining my check
register.

The moral of this tale: Beware of Geeks bearing Revisionist History.

;-)

-dq
Received on Tue Jan 16 2001 - 07:49:17 GMT