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Relatively
speaking, I have rather a lot of experience with computers - which seem the
most important invention since printing, as far as I can see, and
essentially for the same reason: it enables individuals to have access
to and work with much more information that they would have without the
technology.
Here I shall
briefly outline my experience with computers, and review the best
and worst programs I saw since 1987.
General
computing experience
Sitting daily
in front of a computer for many hours since 1987, I have seen a lot
of programs. It must easily run in the tenthousands, if not more, but I
never made a proper count, and indeed used most programs only very
briefly. Most of my experience with computers is with
PCs
and more specifically with programs running on the operating systems
DOS
and
Windows. I have some
experience with the
Apple
world
and with some other operating systems, but am in no position to say much
that is useful about them.
In a sense, my
computing experiences started in the early 70-ies, when I worked for a
company that rented out software engineers to banks and such
institutions, to write programs for
mainframes,
mostly written in
Cobol. I had
landed accidentally in that company looking for work - and left it again
after several months because I did not like the atmosphere ("ITs"
- "Information Technologists" - of the early seventies, as
greedy and dishonest as those of the late 90ies), but it did first
expose me to
Algol and
Fortran.
During the
70-ies I did many different things, but spend most of my time reading
and learning mathematical logic, philosophy and science, not because of
computers, but because of an interest in clear thinking and logic.
Mathematical logic turned out later to be generally helpful in
understanding computers, and those who are interested in a dose of the
same should check my
Logic page and a book by
Marvin
Minsky: "Finite and infinite machines", that explains
very clearly what a
Turing-machine
is; what a
Post- production system
is; what
McCulloch and Pitts 1940-ies
theory of neural nets was like, and many other interesting
details.
In 1979 a
friend of mine bought the first handheld computer I saw (apart from
calculators, of course). It was called "SIM",
and consisted of a naked motherboard on which there was an LED-window as used
on calculators, that was capable of displaying all of 12 characters. It was in fact a
handheld calculator with the extra that it could be programmed - in its
own
machine code.
This SIM was
not much of a success, even while it was theoretically interesting, and
my friend bought an
Apple in
1980 or 1981. This had its own video-screen (yellow on black, with a
very crude resolution), had 48 or 64K
RAM,
and did run
AppleBasic. It was
great fun (and quite expensive), but one of the setbacks was that you
had to store your stuff on
audio-tape
- there were no floppy disks or hard drives then. Also, there was no
editing software, no spreadsheets, and not much else besides
Basic.
(Even so, the experience was totally different from computing on a
mainframe - where one had to hand in one's programs as punch-cards and
was returned a printed page of output.)
In 1987 I first
saw an
Osborne, which was my
first intimation of what personal computing would be like. Osbornes were
the first "laptops" - except that they were designed in the
early 80-ies, and quite heavy and large. But they did run
WordStar,
they did run
VisiCalc, they
did have their own mini-screen, and they had all of 64K RAM, a 0.6 Mhz
processor, and the operating system
CP/M.
They were not only great fun, but definitely useful for writing and
calculating, and you could store your work on
128K
soft floppy disks.
The same year I
got my first real
PC, which
happened to be a Philips (since the father of my then girl-friend was an
overpaid and incompetent middle manager in that Dutch company). It had a
4 Mhz processor, 256 K memory, and no hard drive. Also, it ran WordStar,
an early version of the spreadsheet
Lotus
and more.
In 1988 I
upgraded to an 8 Mhz processor, 640K memory and a 20 Mb harddisk, and
this, in various variants, remained my personal computer till 1996. I
did some upgrading, mostly on the video - which turned from green on
black to
CGA
with 8 basic
colours (useless and ugly) and then to
EGA.
In 1996 I first
got on the internet with a 133 Mhz computer, incidentally for a price ¼ of
the Osborne and ½ of the Philips I had used before; then I got a 366 Mhz
machine with 8 GB diskspace, which I bought for less than the 133 Mhz of
1996; and in 2003 I am working on a 1,6 MB HP with 256 MB RAM and 40 GB
harddisk.
As far as I am
concerned, the best thing about the last two machines I used is the video: For the
first time since I am computing I can display photographs on the screen which
do look
like photographs, also if they have the size of the screen.
Finally, there
are two things I have done most with computers:
Writing texts,
and writing programs. These days, I write texts exclusively in
HTML
or plain ASCII,
and I write programs either in
Prolog
(DOS: perhaps not as neat but easier to program than for Windows),
Visual
Prolog,,
Java
or Delphi (for
Windows), and I have developed a strong taste
for Smalltalk and specifically Squeak,
because it has a nice approach to programming.
The best
programs I saw:
Here is a list
of favorite programs I saw since 1987, and my reasons why.
VisiCalc:
This I first saw in 1987 on an Osborne computer. These ran on a 0.6 Mhz
processor with 64K memory, using the operating system CP/M. It was the
first spreadsheet I saw in my life, and it was pretty spectacular.
Compared to recent spreadsheets running on 200+ Mhz processors VisiCalc
was a mere plaything, and an ugly one at that, but it was this program
that convinced business-men that computers might be useful.
WordStar: This I also first saw in
1987 on an Osborne computer - the same as described above, with the same
limitations of memory and speed. Even so, especially for someone like
me, who has been typing enormous amounts of texts on a typewriter since
1966, to first see a program like WordStar was amazing.
One of the
nicest things about WordStar was the clear and sensible thinking its
makers had done about shortcuts by way of the keyboard:
Everything was
as intuitive as was possible in those days. By contrast, the much more
popular WordPerfect - that I review below - was one of the worst
programs I've ever seen, apparently made by a bunch of loonies who
consciously attempted to invent the least intuitive keyboard short-cuts
for all tasks that they could think of.
Lucid: I've seen many spreadsheets
since VisiCalc, such as Lotus 123, Excel, Quattro and others, but for
sheer elegance and clarity the spreadsheet Lucid that I bought in 1988
was amazing: a pop-up spreadsheet that ran in 64 K, was written in
Assembler, took 89K in all, and could do anything Lotus could do, except
that Lucid was faster, looked nicer, and had many more facilities.
Dazzle: I wonder how many
screeensavers there are these days. The first I saw came with the Norton
Commander - affectionately: NC - which was a very useful program to
survey your disks in DOS-days. NC popped up a night sky (or black
screen) with falling stars (or random dots "." and stars
"*"). Since these days I've seen flying toasters, whole earths
keeping time with local time, fishes, and God knows what else.
By far the most
amazing screensaver I ever saw is Dazzle, a DOS-product of 1988. It
produces better "Abstract Art" than any you ever saw in any
museum, and is a great feat of programming.
DesqView: In DOS-days, a PC had 640K
addressable memory and - if you were rich enough - a 20 MB harddisk.
Also, DOS permitted the running of only one program at the time. Ten
years later, my present computer has 64 MB addressable memory and an 8.3
GB harddisk.
At the time,
this meant that if you wanted to write a letter in which there was some
spreadsheet-information, you had to write the letter in, say, WordStar;
end that program and start up a spreadsheet, do your work in that; end
that program and save your results as text; restart WordStar and import
the text-version of your spreadsheet-info; re-edit that to WordStar's
own file-format, and so on. Of course, there also was no copy-and-paste
from one program to the other.
On the PC-s of
these days, Windows takes care of all that. Indeed, there also was
Windows in 1988 and later, but it was very slow and very prone to crash,
and not much use I could see (having played with version 2.2 and kicked
if from my disk as useless).
The Windows of
the 80-ies and early 90-ies was a program called DesqView, that allowed
you to open several programs at the same time on your screen, under DOS,
and copy and paste between them. Compared to the Windows of the time it
was a miracle of programming, and worked quite well and quite quick
(except that it needed a - comparative - lot of diskspace for swapfiles).
Borland's compilers: I have
programmed in quite a few languages using quite a few compilers, but
since I started - with Turbo Pascal and Turbo Prolog - it remained the
case that I like Borland's approach to programming, programming
environments, documentation etc. much better than what e.g. MicroSoft
has to offer.
Prolog: Prolog - short for "PROgramming
in LOGic" is another type of programming language than the better
known ones like Basic or C. I like it better than either Basic or C and
have programmed a lot in Turbo Prolog and its successors, the latest of
which is known as Visual Prolog and allows fast and easy programming for
Windows - if you know the language, which will take some time.
Edith: Effectively, I worked under
DOS from 1987 till 1996, when I got a computer fast enough to run
Windows95 and go on the internet. Also, in these days I programmed
mostly in Turbo Prolog, that was later resold by Borland to its Danish
originators, who since kept developing it. In 1991 the PDC (Prolog
Development Company) put out a special Prolog-compiler for hypertext
which I bought, in which I wrote a hypertext-editor for DOS called
Edith.
Edith could do
- in 1991 - what today's browsers can do: Use long filenames, link
text-files to anchored places in other text-files, start up programs
from links etc. and did it under DOS. I finished the program in 1992 and
used it for three years as the main program on my computer, just as
these days I am generally working in a html-environment because I really
like the idea of hypertext (or texts with links to any relevant
material).
StarOffice: The best "all in one" software I know
is
StarOffice 5.1, originally German, recently acquired by Sun, and freely
available to private persons. If you've ever worked with MicroSoft's
Office, and have been driven to the wall by its slowness, its talking
paperclip, its unintuitive set-up or its price, you know where you have
to go for something much better - and very much cheaper.
Also, if you
care for programming and for logical thinking, you may compare
MicroSoft's Office with StarOffice, and marvel. Meanwhile, StarOffice
has an open source follow-up called Open Office that's worth looking at,
especially if you want the facilities of Microsoft's Office without
having to pay and without risking to be driven nuts by its talking
paperclip.
Squeak:
This is a successor of Smalltalk-80, mostly written by the same people
that designed the original Smalltalk. It was first released in 1996, but
I first discovered it in 2001. Since 2003 it is free open source
developed by its own user community. Like Smalltalk, it embodies an
approach to programming that differs from all other programming
environments.
The worst
programs I saw:
Sitting daily
in front of a computer for many hours since 1987 years, I have seen a lot
of programs. It must easily run in the tenthousands, if not more, but I
never made a proper count, and indeed used most programs only very
briefly. Most of my experience with computers is with PCs and more
specifically with programs running on the operating systems DOS and
Windows. I have some experience with the Apple World and with some other
operating systems, but am in no position to say much that is useful
about them.
Here is a list
of most awful programs I saw the last 12 years, and my reasons why.
WordPerfect:
Between 1988 and 1995 probably enough time was lost by naïve workers in
offices trying to learn the keyboard shortcuts of WordPerfect -
apparently thought up by a bunch of moronic psychopaths - to feed the
many millions starving from hunger at the time, if only the time had
been spend on that instead of on learning WordPerfect.
It was a totally insane set-up, but it was very cleverly marketed, with
an underlying sound theory of human motivation:
If you succeed
in persuading office workers to start on WordPerfect, and they spend
most of a year learning a completely insane keyboard-setup, they've
invested so much frustration and time in the program that they
automatically will convince themselves it is a great program. (To
psychologists, the theory that explains this is known as "cognitive
dissonance theory", that is also remarkably effective in explaining
the placebo-effect: If you spend 100 dollars on a miracle medicine that
in fact doesn't work, you will adjust your beliefs to feel it working
for you, because the alternative, that you have been hoaxed, is even
less palatable for most men and women.)
Windows: Windows95 was a bright bunch of
kludges, workarounds and bugs. But it did look nice, finally brought a
graphical environment - pixels instead of characters as basic screen
elements - to focus on the PC, and it also combined several possibilities into one
that until then could not be properly combined. Also, it was cleverly
marketed.
How many times
Windows95 crashed on me, I don't know - I guess thousands of times,
regularly with the consequent necessity of reinstalling it (again three
quarters of an hour of your life wasted on Bill Gates' altar). Also, in
three years I lost between 50 and 100 Mb of files, in both cases because
Windows decided to upset the hardddisk.
Windows98 was
not much better than Windows95 (and I have here deleted some text
describing my experiences with it) and crashed almost as often.
In short: I do
not like Windows, but I use it because there is nothing available at
present that gives you the same - much like DOS in DOS-days, and much
like most moral choices in real life (namely between hopefully tolerably
bad or considerably worse).
To be fair: IF
it works well, and as long as it does, it is OK - but as soon as you get
problems, the help turns out to be unhelpful or misleading; the wizards
turn out to be morons; the documentation you require is unavailable;
there is no help from MicroSoft; most documentation you can buy is
tenth-rate, ill-written and bulky; and there just are no clear
explanations about very many aspects of the system any intelligent user
is interested in. (And indeed, my system under Windows95 crashed at
least once a day, and Windows98 hasn't turned out to do any better for
me.)
Those who want
to tell me about the beauties of Linux, should first follow this link: Linux.
And there are four relevant remarks at this point, that also
explain why I still did not make the switch to Linux:
First, I still
did not succeed in getting a Linux installed that included internet,
sound and printing and installed painlessly. At present - 2003 - this is
probably due mostly to my not trying hard enough, which is
connected with my illness M.E. (that leaves one little energy) and my
distaste for technicalities related to operating systems (which I find
thoroughly boring: They should work without my having to dive
under the hood).
Second,
meanwhile I know enough about Linux to know that running it requires a
considerable amount of technical knowledge. Most of this is not
difficult and some of it is useful but I don't have the health for it
(see previous remark) and also, as I said, operating systems do not
really interest me.
Third, at
present I run Windows XP
which has - in my experience - MUCH improved over the earlier Windows in
that it doesn't crash anymore (well: twice in a year, opposed to twice a
day with Windows 95) and if it crashes it recovers without serious
problems (so far). Since my main problem with earlier Windows were the
daily crashes, there is at present no urgent need for me to switch to
another OS.
Fourth, even
so I will try to switch to Linux as my primary OS because it is open
source, which I much prefer over hidden source, and because Windows XP
includes a license that effectively means that if Microsoft wants to
enter your harddisk behind your back and do with it whatever it pleases
it can do so by contract. If you don't agree to the license you can't
use Windows XP.
So .... people
who know these things far better than I do tell me that Debian is
an excellent Linux distribution.
Games:
Over the years I've seen quite a lot of computer games. Apart from
chess-programs, I've very quickly removed all of these. The main reason
is this: While a few were mildly funny to play with (like the
"Larry" programs by Sierra), nearly everything I've seen -
"Quake", "Doom" etc. - appears to be written by and
for braindead sadists.
Put otherwise,
I get no real kick whatsoever out of virtual killin', shootin', stabbin',
and it usually bores me and also upsets me: If this is the sort of stuff
that the average male finds enjoyable, the fact that hundreds of
millions of innocent human beings were murdered this century by their
fellow men becomes a little easier to understand: apparently the average
Joe Sixpack is a psychopathic murderer as soon as you scratch his
surface or set him free with a gun and no questions asked or
responsibilities exacted.