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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (13380)	2/26/2006 7:51:55 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541900

Interesting contrasting experiences. I programmed my way through a dissertation in the middle to late 60s. Fortran. Main frames. Would get lost in the computer center; would come out and discover I had missed the night. Carrying around cards; etc. Considered focusing on data analysis and computing as a career. As the 70s came and went I kept leaning in the direction of the Apple II, III, and the Lisa but was too involved in other kinds of work, none of it computing. Two things changed my mind. IBM came out with its personal computer and I began to see their educational benefits. So I whipped together a group of faculty to start arguing for an experimental pedagogical lab based on the IBM PC. We labored away for a year, worked administrators into some levels of interest. And then the Mac came out. 1984. The one administrator who had been playing games with us, the provost, was moved aside (new president) and another one hired. Who loved the idea. So we started with Macs in the experimental lab and my wife and I bought them for the home. I was dazzled with the little sucker. And liked the fact I could understand what it was doing. I had friends who used IBMs who felt just as you say you did. They loved DOS, loved the sense of access to the insides it gave them. I had the same sense and the Mac OS was not an interface over DOS. When Apple began to look as if it was going belly up and I took on a quasi administrative role that required I understand Windows PCs better, I began, over a two year period, to move to Windows. Macs had seduced me; Windows, however, just was. And so I resisted learning DOS (should have), hired people to repair software and hardware problems (I did all of that on the Mac), well, that's all stated with a bit of hyperbole. But it's close enough. I don't really expect the same degree of rush that I got the first time the line of typing wrapped around the right margin and started, without hitting the returning key, back on the left margin. Or the first time I did some error correction and realized I could lose the whitener. Or the first time I connected the Compuserve and thought I was connected to the world. But who knows.