USING classic machines

I monitor this mailing list (some might call it lurking) because of all the now-classic machines that I used to own. If I had the room, time, and skill, I might be a collector like most of you, but for now I must be content to watch. I'm glad to see that so many people are still getting use out of these machines. There are certainly times when I wish I understood what was going on inside a Windows 95 box as well as I understood the various Kaypros, the Geneva, the Timex-Sinclair, the Model 100, or the other machines I once used on a daily basis. I suppose that even my Mac SE would qualify as a "classic machine" by now. On the other hand, let's not go overboard and say that you can do as much with those lean, mean computers of yesteryear as you can with today's bloated and overpowered desktop Cadillacs. Despite the processing power and overhead devoted to being more user friendly, today's machines are better at doing most kinds of real work. Okay, if you're just writing business letters or balancing your checkbook, a Kaypro is going to work just as well as a Dell Pentium. But that's only one extreme. When I was working on my dissertation, I wrote a cluster analysis program for my Kaypro II because it was the only machine I had. It took months to write and debug the program (written in S-BASIC), and every time I ran the analysis it took two days--literally, 48+ hours of grinding away. I could do the same thing in seconds using SAS and the P133 machine on which I'm typing this. In fact, I do this sort of thing for a living, and there are so many things that would be a major project on a classic machine which I do now just as a matter of preliminary exploration. And it's not just statistics. Writing reports is much easier with a mouse and multitasking. Getting data from dBASE II to Perfect Calc and then moving the summary table to Wordstar or Perfect Writer was a considerable chore. Yesterday I zapped a bunch of Quattro Pro tables (based on SAS output) over to a Word document, and everything showed up with no trouble, formatting and all. Those are programs written by rival companies, but they can talk to each other just fine. Others have mentioned that it takes more skill and intelligence to use classic software than to point and click. I don't disagree with that, and I'm proud of what I was able to get those machines to do. Learning to use those kinds of computers has given me a better outlook about later ones, and I still tweak my current set up much more than most people (and certainly more than our IT department would like me to). But then, I remember a lot of people in my Kaypro User's Group who never figured out how to use the modems in their 2Xs. Friendlier interfaces have opened up the benefits of computing to a lot of people who would never have put up with CP/M. After all computers are _supposed_ to make your life easier. If that means they require less intelligence and skill to use, that means they're doing their job. --Dav david_a._vandenbroucke(a)hud.gov