CompuServe Messages

I computerized our whole accounting system in the summer of '87. I will always remember with especial fondness the demonstration I gave of the new timesheets. The entire staff, secretarial and otherwise, gathered round and watched me open one of the new sheets. "Now…" I said, and was instantly interrupted by the accounts manager, a very bright woman: "How did you bring it up?" I actually assumed she was asking me for the benefit of the new employees. "Well," I said, you type "ss" and then type your name." She bent over her notebook and wrote, upside down from my view, "S.S. YOUR NAME." Then she looked up and inquired, "Why?" I am told that after I started going to college, the new version of the operating system our mini uses arrived and forced them to abandon the sort-ofgraphics "Shell" they had used previously. I am assured, furthermore, that – not without a great deal of heartbreak – the entire staff was taught the joys of CLI, and can now use it in a rudimentary way to run spreadsheets and the like. The mind boggles. The scripting you refer to sounds fascinating. If there were an educational purchase plan for the Amiga I would tell my brother to buy one (he's thinking of getting one before leaving school). Unfortunately, that's partly my fault. The department I used to work for here at school is in charge of new computing tech (AdTech) and had me write a detailed evaluation of "X-windows" for the Amiga. I had never seen an Amiga before, but I guess I got the worst possible intro; the screen was huge, but it was washed-out greyscale, making it impossible to figure out the GUI and removing the color; the GUI bore *no* resemblance to the CLI, which lacked any user manuals save a Quick-Reference Card, and the Ethernet cable was so huge that it had to be forced against the wall or it would drag itself out of its socket (that stalled us for two days; none of us thought to check back there). To top it off, the X-windows I tested stank. [continued in reply]