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From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: unused gifts
Message-ID: <1432@killer.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 29-Aug-87 00:24:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: killer.1432
Posted: Sat Aug 29 00:24:16 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Aug-87 08:57:29 EDT
References: <1140003@hpfcmp.HP.COM>
Organization: Bayou Telecommunications
Lines: 31

in article <1140003@hpfcmp.HP.COM>, chan@hpfcmp.HP.COM (Chan Benson) says:
>>   Look at the math. Let's say you have a course and HP hires ten people
>> each year who have taken that course. Let's assume that it would
>> take each of those people 3 months to learn to use HP computers at
>> work. That saves 3/12 * 10 = 2.5 man years for HP. At $25,000/year
>> salary, HP would save $67,500 the first year. 
> Frankly I don't think HP is interested in hiring anyone who takes three
> months to learn to use our computers. How long are your classes at Purdue
> anyway?

If it's a Unix computer, I can see where HP would not want to hire someone who
took 3 months to learn the system. But I believe the original author was
talking about non-Unix HP systems. I don't know about you, but it does take me
almost exactly three months in order to get up and running at full speed on a
different hardware/software architecture. Sure, I'm generally producing code
after a week or two, but living in manuals and trying to figure out the
eccentricities of varous OS routines doesn't lend oneself to fast efficient
and accurate coding. I have not seen an operating system yet where the
documentation was worth a bucket of warm spit, and where new introducees
didn't have to go thru all sorts of initiation rites in order to graduate to
the order of the OS survivor.... remember your first Unix days, and the first
time you tried to decipher the "man" pages for "termcap" (the library
routines, not the database)? Only way I ever learned how to use it was by
tearing apart the source code, and, in parallel, looking at the sources to a
version of MicroEmacs that supported termcap.... lor knows that the man page
certainly was useless!
--
Eric Green   elg@usl.CSNET     "... is there anybody in there?
{cbosgd,ihnp4}!killer!elg        can anybody hear me?
Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191        is there anyone home?"
Lafayette, LA 70509                  -PF,_DSOTM_