CompuServe Messages

When using the Amiga at work I was "kind of impressed" only until I discovered that the command-line could not be avoided by a power user. That effectively nuked the Amiga for me the same way it nuked MS-DOS and UNIX. Steve, some of us just CANNOT use a CLI. It is predicated on the user having certain ROMs on his motherboard. You must type well and fast (I do) and without errors (I DO NOT) or at least be able to _learn_ to type without errors through necessity (I had 5 years, pre-Mac, and never had anything but constant frustration). You must also have good short-term RAM, in that you must be able to remember path names letter-perfect. So easy for you! So easy for some people. Absolutely, totally foreign to others. To me! Path names are sheer hell to someone without short-term memory. If I couldn't click folders from inside my terminal programs, I'd never remember the name of most of my applications, much less their version numbers. In my years on my Mac I have had to type path names twice. I couldn't do it the first time; I had to go out and check. And I use those folders every day. Which brings me back to your point about your personal path name. You type that every day with no errors? I'd just open windows. Or I'd just leave them open on the desktop, there for all to see when I boot up. Of course, I am perhaps the perfect GUI user. I never script. I never have, even on MS-DOS or UNIX. I doubt I ever will. In the time it took Derek at work to write the script, I had usually deleted everything by hand, and that was with me typing at a CLI! Or the time Derek (our CLI maven at work) helped my brother write a script to crank graphs out of data using Quattro Pro – more than a thousand graphs in all. It took … a week and a half. Always something else wrong. Always one more comma. At last it was done. A whole tree's worth of printer paper had been wasted in testing, but now it worked … and Derek turned to my brother and said, without a trace of sarcasm, "Isn't it wonderful to have the computer do the work for you?" 🙂 🙂 🙂 Don.