I don't recall exactly when it was, but I not too long ago I found myself dealing with the "tediousness" of using a computer. To consider a computer tedious was, for me, such a shock that I had to ponder the implications of that. The result of that pondering was that for my tools, I needed them to work correctly and they rarely were, and getting them fixed was tedious. However I also realized that for the "PC" at least a lot of the wonder had gone out of computers. I remember clearly the FORTRAN printout that computed the impact point of a free falling object dropped from 5,000 feet in a uniform gravity gradient and a perfect vacuum :-) I printed x & y co-ordinates of the object for every tenth second and got 20 pages or so of numbers. That was WONDERful. Writing a PL/I program to use overstrikes to print multi-shaded histograms on a line printer attached to a 370 was pretty fun to. Figuring out what my graphics program on Win98 wasn't seeing mouse events was TEDIOUS. So much of my motivation is driven by the wonder of what the system can do with what it has that I find VAXen and PDP-11s much more impressive than 1.5Ghz Pentium IVs. Capturing the wonder is my secret ingredient to learning. --Chuck