On 11 Jun 98, Frank Lee wrote:
> > they're written by a software engineer as she drills down through all
> > the archaeological layers of code in a Winbox, trying to make it a linux
> > box.
>
> Mike, these are just brilliant. Anyone who hasn't read them yet should.
> Very, very entertaining, they make you want to go home and do exactly the
> same, just for the hell of it.
This quote from one of the articles caught my eye:
For now everything on the system would be something put
there by me, and in the end the system itself would be cleaner, clearer, more knowable -- everything I associate with the idea of "intelligent."
... just this week I was reminiscing with a fellow hobbyist friend about the
good ol' days of personal computing (circa 1985 or thereabouts): how easy it was to do things in DOS that are a cataclysmic pain in the digital butt with Windows; how lean and efficient applications had to be back then if anyone was to use them; and how it was quite possible to know what *every single file on your system actually did* (!)
This was indeed the case for me, back then; it was a sort of point of hobbyist honour for me to go through my directories after installing a new app and then puzzle through what every new file was for, roughly anyway. God, try doing that in Win95... utterly impossible. My \windows\system\ directory alone contains over 1,200 files, most of them quite inscrutable to me. And as for the Registry... yoicks.
I spent a few minutes the other day on my old 386 (long since donated to my ex), and, although it of course couldn't handle much of my daily computing activities 1998-style -- Web surfing, graphic design, 3-D stuff, whatnot -- it sure does do some things a lot better than my Win95 box does. File management in particular; I had forgotten about all the batch files I'd written and spiffy little utilities I'd installed over the years, all of which made file moving, copying, comparing and so on dead simple. In about five seconds I could tell the old beast, "compare all the files in directory A to directory B, and move any TIF files more than three months old, but not read-only, from A to B." Or whatever. So simple.
Anyway, enough reminiscing from the gray-beard contingent :)
----------- Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Town of Almonte: http://www.almonte.com/ Business Web site: http://www.almonte.com/brent/ ____________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done directly from our website for all our lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
