2 Dec
2010
2 Dec
'10
2:12 p.m.
On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 4:54 PM, John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote:
"Baby Duck Syndrome denotes the tendency for
computer users to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)>"imprint" on
the first system they learn, then judge other systems by their similarity
to that first system.
(not that anyone will find this shocking, but...) My first few systems
were the Commodore PET (BASIC and assembly), the COSMAC Elf (1802
assembly), the PDP-8 (assembly), the C-64 (BASIC and assembly), the
Apple II (assembly), then at one job, VAX/VMS, 4BSD and Ultrix on VAX,
and assembly on the 68000 and PDP-11, pretty much all absorbed at
once. I'll certainly confess to being imprinted on all of those -
they are still my favorite environments to play in, no matter how many
new ones I run across. As an example of that, I use Intel (and AMD)
architecture machines for many hours of the day, nearly 365 days a
year, but they don't garner any admiration or respect from me - they
are ubiquitous but not "interesting" to me.
Or, for example, why I'm still running a 1984 copy
of Brief as my
text editor in a DOS window on a dual-24" quad processor PC.
Fortunately I _don't_ use the Commodore screen editor or VMS EDT every
day (but I _do_ use vi every day (learned in 1997) and emacs (learned
in 1985) every week). I never used Brief, but around 1999-2002 I did
use CRiSP, which AFAIK was heavily influenced by Brief.
*quack*
-ethan