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

[John E. Malmberg]

KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:
> 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.

So far, for me, those upgrades always coincided with a hardware upgrade 
that involved a disk drive change.

> 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.

In 1997, I was at a Microsoft TechED conference.  One of the Microsoft 
session presenters stated that according to their surveys, notepad was 
the most popular way to build HTML web pages, in spite of all their 
efforts to provide GUI tools for this.  I do not know if that has changed.

> 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.

Apparently there are still some things that these tools can do that GUI 
based ones can not.

I know of professionals that were told to move off of them, and were 
forced to go back, because the GUI tools they were told to use could not 
generate the same quality of output.  In one case the key feature that 
was missing was the ability to build a useful master index of a collection.

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

I joke about TECO a lot, but I use the full screen editors mainly.  I 
still occasionally encounter things that can more easily be done with 
TECO, but only if you are a dinosaur like me who has most of it's 
command set memorized.

-John