succumbing to university pressure [OFF-TOPIC]

[Peter Evans peterev@xxxxxxxx]

Jon Inggs writes about dead keys:

>We discovered this a year or so ago when our Department
>finally succumbed to university pressure and moved from
>XyWrite 4 for DOS to WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows

I thought that a year or so ago WP was already up to version 8. Certainly
it was up to version 7, which I bought but find terribly frustrating as
it's about as opaque as Word and as I can never manage to do anything
whatever with its SGML functions. (Still, I use the accompanying Quattro
Pro all the time, and it also came with a good set of first-rate fonts that
I use for XyWin.)

Meanwhile, my own institution decided to provide every full-time member of
staff with a computer. The administrative staff all use theirs, as
intended. Perhaps half the teachers were already using computers (Japan is
extraordinarily backward); perhaps two-thirds of these teachers promptly
passed on their bonus, university-issue computers to their kids, spouses,
etc. Of the teachers who weren't already using computers, roughly half
seldom if ever use the computers that were issued to them (I know of
several that stayed in their boxes for over a year, and may still be
there). A pile of taxpayer money down the drain.

All these computers came with MS Office installed ("preinstalled"). Thus,
without any decision that anybody remembers, a large organization switched
to Microsoft. (It's true that I tend to doze through meetings, but my more
alert, Nisus-loving friends assure me that no, I didn't miss anything.)
All text files are now transferred in MS Word DOC format; my polite
reminders that RTF format tends to be more compact, is more portable, and
can't carry the "macro viruses" that afflict the more naive with
unsurprising regularity, is greeted with polite silence. (I don't dare to
mention ZIP compression, etc.)
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Peter Evans