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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC )

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To: Sean W. Smith who wrote (3608)	11/17/1998 1:04:00 AM
From: Zeuspaul	of 14778

Dos?? Interesting. most of the whole EDA (Eletronic Design automation) industry has been highly unix centric for 15 years. Many companies have now have significant PC offerings mostly on NT. The reason Coastal gave me for the slow move to NT is the need to rewrite a multitude of drivers. It is a specialized program that caters to a variety of specialized needs. I am stuck in a world of multiple operating systems. I did a lot of custom development (macros) in DOS versions that do not translate to Windows. The same macro development capability is not available in the Windows versions of the software I use. My first approach was to multiboot the OSes. This approach turned out to be too awkward. The best solution has been to add workstations. Each workstation is configured in a unique OS with a unique configuration for a specific task. The best machine is a dual PII 333 with 512 MB RAM and Appian dual monitor card with a pair of 21 in monitors. It rarely gets used. Instead the guy that it was set up for opts for his Pentium 66 with 64 MB RAM with DOS programs. After nine years of using a program one becomes fluent. The same program rewritten for another OS uses different methodology to execute commands. It takes longer to navigate dialog boxes than to execute from a keyboard. I have spent many hours trying to figure out how to do in Excel what I can do in QPRO for DOS. I use a spread sheet to manipulate and parse data files. In DOS QPRO I can import multiple files. In excel I can open a text file and parse it but can not find a way to import additional data files. It seems simple but I can not find a way. My solution is to maintain both spreadsheets. QPRO runs in a Windows DOS window but it runs slower. Some of my other programs do not run in a DOS window. With the added capability of Windows based programs I have to sacrifice speed and past achievements. It is an issue of past success. If I were to have started the computer game in the last three or four years the legacy problems would not be as significant. What does one do if one were to invest 50K in software and another 50k in training and development and then along comes a new OS? With multiple users of varying degrees of expertise it is not easy to turn on a dime. Zeuspaul

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