Where should the type information be 143

On Thu, 07 Apr 05 11:54:40 GMT

Heisenberg rules :)

But seriously - it's a given that more uses get found for computers than anyone would ever dream of while designing the things.

ISTR that the Radio Astronomy group used to get dedicated sessions (overnight IIRC) on the Cambridge 370 in the late 1970s because timesharing wasn't enough for them. I suspect that even that group has excess processor power these days.

Sure - I often observe to people that the thing they use as a typewriter could do a pretty good job of weather modelling with the right data feed ... usually while waiting for some piece of bloatware to load and-or perform some menial data transformation.

The versatility hasn't disappeared it's just been suppressed and plastered over with a GUI mess. One problem is that the GUI mess seems to many to remove the need to learn anything before using it, another is that it tends to be limiting in inconvenient ways.

When I started in the biz there were users of turnkey systems that required almost no time to learn (but usually had courses provided), users of sophisticated flexible specialist tools that required a good degree of knowledge of the task and a fair bit of learning of the tool and programmers who were supposed to be able to do anything, perhaps with a manual in one hand and a keyboard in the other.

Nowadays everyone is expected to grapple with the GUI to get anything done. Turnkey has all but vanished and the specialist tools have all the knobs on display where they can't be found among the mess and critical knobs missing. Programmers have to be certified1 and are not expected to be able to learn anything without a course. But that's just the mainstream - there's life in the fringes thankfully.

1 This used to be just an occupational hazard :)