Boanne wrote:
<Or, Bernie, Dale, John T, Pete, and everyone else on this
>thread: I have really enjoyed your posts :)
Putting me in there? Hmm... atleast my mails held (atleast IMO) a higher
standard then they normally do ;)
I find this topic very interesting and it gives us more in a debate then just:
"Get Linux!"
"No! Never, all my programs are for DOS!"
"M$ did this and that crap."
"This thing isn't working."
"I found this thing..."/"I got this thing..."
Even as these topics are interesting (I've read all of the mails that have
come). I find something where we have diffrent (but not *that* diffrent)
view on something much more appealing since I think we all will learn much
more from it. (Ex. What good have I to read explanations of how to insert a
MFM drive? I'll probably never see a MFM drive (or atleast not try and get
them to work, I thing I've got one or two somewhere around here). I still
find it interesting, and never skip one word (except the well known
signatures)). Keep up the mailing - which BTW has been getting down more
and more for each day :(
I never calculated what we would have around now, but the last few days
seems very slow. Or you shouldn't have entered the Arachne list and divide
your attention like this ;)
>I'm really enjoying this discussion (DOS GUI) and [uh-oh! <g>]
>it's got me thinking...
We better watch out then ;)
>I've been thinking back on all the things I have learned in my
>42 years;
(snipped list)
>None of these things was
>"easy to learn," yet I learned them all, and in every case it
>was more than worth it. (Well, except maybe the diapers...)
Exactly, nothing is easy when you start to learn it. What can be make it
easier is if you've:
1. Ever seen something like it before
2. Aren't afraid of discovering new things
>Where did the idea that computers should be "easy" come from in
>the first place? Where did the idea that Win3.xx or Win9x is
>"easy to learn" come from?
M$ prompted as such an the media loved it since they where used to such an
approach after using Mac for all those years before. (Mac is almost only
used by doctors and journalists AFAIK).
>Isn't all learning the same to begin with, including computers?
It's more abstract. A paper everyone (hopefully) can understand and
understand how to put it in a cabinet so it isn't lost. A computer file is
diffrent since the user can't touch it and I think that is the biggest
difficulty of learning for the average user. Instead of learning this users
finds it more easy to understand if someone tells him how it is and M$ has
done just that.
>Whether you decide to learn
>Chinese cooking or computers (Win9x or DOS), aren't you facing
>the unknown in both cases, or at least something unknown to you?
>Isn't that the very nature of learning itself? Isn't the real
>task bringing the "unknown" into the "known"?
Yes, but also finding the way to make unknown things known to you.
>Also, in all cases I mentioned in the first paragraph, first I
>learned a few basics, then progressed on to the more complicated
>and "fine-tuning" aspects. Isn't this how most things, including
>DOS are learned? No one can be an expert on *anything*
>(including Win9x) in 15 minutes or even a couple weeks.
Noone is an expert at Win9x since every task can be made in so many ways
(many in over 20!) That makes it hard IMO since everyone use so diffrent
techniques. And there are always new things to learn about DOS. I even read
trough some of the help for M$-DOS 6.20 today and it's really funny since
M$ have failed to translate words on one line but could on the line above.
Also it says that, and I quote, "Warning! Make sure that it (SmartDRV, my
comment) is finished before shutting down or starting the computer!" (This
was translated back from Swedish). So I assume that I can't turn the PC on
if I'm not user that SmartDRV has finished. Better leave it off then ;)
Reminds me of the strange thing in the Word 6 manual (or was that also a
local swedish thing?)
>Something else I wanted to say... Circa 1987: When I learned
>DOS (2.11) it really was, for all intents and purposes, all
>there was. I knew many people in the local computer community
>and out of all those people (hundreds through the BBS's, less
>"in person" of course) not a single one used an Apple. There
>was one who had a Commador 64. A few had PS2's. Everyone else
>had clones running M$-DOS or IBM PC-DOS, and if there were
>"alternative DOS's", no one was talking about them, or using
>them. Of course this was before the InterNet became mainstream,
>but I would think even back then alternative DOS's would have
>been discussed in the BBS's. So I'm willing to cut the newbies
>some slack, in spite of M$ ad campaigns and because of the
>InterNet, they do have more choices for an OS, and the
>information about other OS's is freely available on the Net.
I never heard of any other OS until 89-90 when I was promised a part time
job at a newly started multimedia buissness in town. However they soon
crashed (hey, I didn't even get a chance to start working). They used OS/2
instead of DOS+Win since that was better for them (in retrospect it might
have been better to choose something else).
I don't count Mac or Amiga etc. as other OS since they aren't on the same
computer.
>On "languages": Think about it, almost everything has it's
>own specialized language, and if you want to learn it, you
>gotta' learn the lingo. Medicine has it's specalized language,
>so does law, and music, and chemistry, and crochet, and
>even religion. Much of learning these things is learning the
>language of these things. Why would it be any different with
>computers (OS's)?
In many of these cases you can learn two (or three) languages and get along
fine. Learn Latin and Greek (and English in some cases) and you will not
have any problems with most of them.
>I have a sneaking suspicion that Apple is somehow responsible
>for all this - it couldn't be IBM after all! <grin>
I blaim almost everything on a few sources, M$ and Apple beeing two of them
(I'll not name the entire list here since I'll probably get flamed then) ;)
Ok, one of them is IBM (but I've already mentioned that earlier so I think
I'm safe).
>*Get a Pentium III - you can reboot faster!
I doub't that since it's slower on 16 bit operations (but 450MHz might
compensate for that<g>).
//Bernie
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