An OutoftheMain Activity 3788

On Wed, 14 Jun 2006 10:42:17 -0500, Charles Richmond

Although I'm not going to condemn you for being "grumpy", it has occurred to me that this could indeed have been said before.

After all, back in the days of magnetostrictive delay lines and mercury acoustic delay lines, designing a computer was a tricky thing, and programming them was a fine art!

And then the Williams tube came along, and programmers could just access any location in memory *whenever they felt like it*. Although accessing one location too often compared to the ones next to it was still bad, and Williams tubes were finicky and error-prone.

But then they came along with *core memory*. Well! After that, just about anyone could build a computer or program one! No longer was electronic computing the province of research scientists at the frontiers of human knowledge; their production was just a mercantile operation.

For computers to get cheaper and more powerful opens up new doors. And when new doors *are* opened, re-inventing the wheel is no longer exciting. The thing to do with a door is to go through it.

John Savard Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server More than 140,000 groups Unlimited download