Re: XyWrite and TeX

["Martin J. Osborne" osborne@xxxxxxxx]

I'm in full agreement. The "surge of ignorance" is of course not
necessarily a bad thing. In the 1980s the sort of person who wanted to
write poetry and never had the slightest desire to learn the
nitty-gritty of DOS had no alternative but to master the concept of a
batch file. Now they can write their poetry and forget about all that
technical stuff. True, in the best of all worlds they would be using a
better tool than Word (or whatever), but they are likely better off than
they were, or would have been, 20 years ago.


Robert Holmgren wrote:


** Reply to message from "Martin J. Osborne"  on
Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:18:26 -0400

The second big factor is that users today can be utterly ignorant of computer
innards and get away with it. Woe to the XyWriter who doesn't know something
about operating systems, DOS, peripherals, interfaces. That's I think the
biggest single change in the computing environment, versus the 80s and early
90s (right up until Windows 3.x): the enormous surge of ignorance, and also
forgetfulness among those who once knew.



--
Martin J. Osborne
Department of Economics
150 St. George Street
University of Toronto
Toronto
M5S 3G7
Canada
http://www.economics.utoronto.ca

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