transputers again was: The dissolution of Commodore 2928

I always believed life was too short to learn TeX. I think it came from having to read too many Springer-Verlag "Lecture Notes In Computer Science" (read: halfbutted formal methods conference papers that don't warrant anything better) that tended to be typeset in Computer Modern on cheap 150dpi laser printers with all the diagrams drawn in crayon because nobody could be bothered to choose a diagramming tool...)

Back when I was a nipper, "real programmers" (or those who aspired to be such) tended to use ntroff (or RUNOFF on VMS); TeX was used by formalists, mathematicians and people who.... weren't our kind of people, really ;) (The same sort of people who said their latest, greatest formal methods were "real time" because they had a variable called 't' in them...)

I also developed an aversion to .dvi files and the awful font handling in TeX; it was a very good way of filling up discs.

I can just about speak enough LaTeX to get by, but I don't often admit to it. I have this feeling they might confiscate my boots and make me wear sandals if I ever start voluntarily writing TeX.

pete --