13 Aug
2001
13 Aug
'01
9:45 p.m.
On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, Adrian Vickers wrote:
In many places? The mainframe rules the roost period. What do you think
serves the databases that run the neato little things your PCs do on the
internet? IBM DB2/390.
I don't know if I necessarily think this anymore, but whenever I used to
see droves of mindless PC zombies getting on the 'net, I used to think,
"Hmmm. Fresh meat."
That and all the stupid ass "crackers" who learned assembler just to get
free shareware.
I would've loved to have seen the Atari computers take over. I still have
a couple of Hades I use regularly.
At 05:16 pm 13/08/2001 -0400, Douglas Quebbeman
wrote:
I will have to as well.
For me, it should be a date to *mourn*, not to celebrate.
Hmm, I'm going to have to disagree with you now... <snip>
I think it was somewhere in that range too. Having my Sinclair 1000 talk
to my Colecovision through the memory slot was kinda neat.
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...
How about something like LISP or SML? Maybe Prolog (!)... I know I'm
pushing it with that one.
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...
I'll be off tinkering with my big-iron VAX and my S/390 G5 (ot).
Peace... Sridhar
Cheers!
Ade.
--
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