Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!think!ames!aurora!labrea!decwrl!pyramid!voder!kontron!optilink!cramer
From: cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: The GNU Manifesto
Message-ID: <1868@optilink.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jan 88 16:37:14 GMT
References: <9591@tekecs.TEK.COM> <328@splut.UUCP> <3144@briar.Philips.Com> <1848@optilink.UUCP> <2228@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Organization: Optilink Corporation, Petaluma, CA
Lines: 33

> In article <1848@optilink.UUCP> cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
> > [comments deleted]
> >  ...there are definitely
> >areas where the PC really shines -- word processing, for example.
> 
> I'm sure that there are many, many people who would vehemently disagree
> with this claim. The IBM PC's problems are well-known, and mostly
> reflect bad original
> design. The PC was not state-of-the-art in 1981, and is far from it today.
> Whether this was deliberate IBM policy, or just necessary cost-cutting,
> is a topic
> that has been debated for a long while, and I don't want to get into it now.
> 
> But suffice it to say the the keyboard, the display hardware, and the
> WP software available are, to put it succinctly, miserable. This is not
> an idiosyncratic, cranky opinion. It is one shared by many, many people who
> have had to use this piece of sh*t to do word-processing.

Excuse me?  Compared to what?  Compared to poor suckers using troff on
UNIX systems?  Being "state-of-the-art" is not a requirement to being a
useful computer.

Keyboard?  I found the original PC keyboard a damn nuisance -- for about a
week.  The 101-key "Enhanced" AT keyboard is badly suited to using the
control key, which on some word processors and program editors is a real
problem.   There are other word processors like Microsoft Word that make
little use of the control key.

There are some pretty impressive word processors out there that run on
Sun hardware -- at about 5-6 times the price of a PC.  But overall, the
UNIX environment is notable for being 10 years behind the times.

Clayton E. Cramer