[Long] [OT] That Big Shadow Over Your Shoulder, Part 2, was Re: [Coco] Re...

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/29/04 12:17:34 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
wdg3rd at comcast.net writes:

> I have yet to see a smooth transition from one release of Windows to 
>  another via upgrade in-place (even something as theoretically trivial 
>  as Windows 3.1 to Windows for Workgroups 3.11).  It's usually easier to 
>  get a new machine and sneakernet the files to it.

Or what I did last time -- build a new machine and transplant the working HD 
into it.  Well, that was a hardware upgrade.  I did upgrade in place from 
Win95 to 98, more or less hassle-free (except for an old ZIP disk driver that had 
to be updated before it would stop hanging 98).  By "in place" I mean I put 
the Win98 upgrade CD in my old 95 box and it replaced the Win95.
Not clear if later Win versions will upgrade so smoothly.

Dennis has not said so, but he's pointed out the divide between modern GUI 
WYSIWYG editors for word processing, DTP, and music scores on one hand,
and on the other hand the "dot processors" for words and music and graphics, 
which include Nroff, Tex, LilyPond and another command-text driven music 
typesetter called MUP that some guys I knew at Bell Labs invented.  Oddly, HTML 
keeps dot-processing alive, at the expense of those horrid angle brackets instead 
of periods.

Tex is apparently still strong in academic circles, probably wherever Pascal 
is still used.  Bell Labs hung on to dot-processors well into the late 80s, 
then went to FrameMaker on Sun Solaris UNIX, and has probably succumbed to NW 
Word by now -- some management types were already using it heavily when I left 6 
years ago.

It would seem WYSIWYG is winning everywhere.  I certainly wouldn't want my 
music composing any other way.
  --Mike K.