Re: Be not the last to set the old aside

[Phil Smith phil@xxxxxxxx]

At 02:48 PM 7/9/98 -0400, Leslie Bialer wrote:

[snip]
>do people hereabouts use XyWrite because of all the good
>things it does, or do they use it out of some cranky pride in not
>upgrading, or (worse) because they fear the new?

There are good reasons for sticking with the tried&true, e.g., XyWrite.
After years and years (14 in my case) of using XyWrite, I have a lot of
finger skills (and a highly doctored .KBD file and .PRN file) in which I
have a large investment. An alternative would have to be awfully good to
persuade me to make the change. This is surely true for most of the members
of this list.

I have been through numerous OS changes in my computing career, and each
one was painful. After years of getting used to OS/360 and its quirks, I
was given the privilege of using VM/CMS (objectively much, much better);
and throwing away all the petty skills I had acquired in OS/360. And so on.

It is as though we who have studied, say, Spanish, assiduously over the
years were told one day that Romanian, a great improvement over Spanish
(for this and that objective reason), was to replace Spanish next month and
we had better learn the new and throw out the old.

The former director of our Computing Centre called OS-specific knowledge
"pseudo-knowledge", and he was right.

To those who say "It's an improvement; jump aboard", I like to ask: "When
did you switch from the QWERTY typewriter keyboard to Dvorak". It's
objectively much, much better, and you can easily program your computer
keyboard to be a Dvorak keyboard. But, in fact, very few people have made
that painful and expensive jump, least of all the geeks who give us a new
version of Win every 3 years (or those in our Computing Centre), touting
its "improved" interface.

I don't continue to love and use Xy out of perversity; just out of
practical, sensible necessity.

Hope you are the same,

Phil Smith