[ale] Some days are worse than others

[Sean Kilpatrick]

On Friday 06 July 2007 04:37, Joe Bayes wrote:
| I don't like vi much either, but when I've got a sick system that
| can't do emacs, vi beats the hell out of ed or cat.

Understand that.  More than once I have had to rescue an ailing
system from the Grub prompt.  At that point the only editor available
is vi.  But I _really_ don't like it.  I believe it predates Apple's
development of the GUI/mouse tandem. When all you had to work with
was a keyboard and the limited character set of a terminal there wasn't
any real choice.  Anyone who has taken Computer Science courses at
college has, almost certainly, been forced to learn and work with vi.
Such courses didn't exist 45 years ago. I took the only course in
computer programming offered to undergrads back then -- in the
engineering school.  We started with machine language, moved up to
Assembly code, and finally were allowed to use the compiler for
Algol 60.  The Fortran compiler was off limits.  The computer, a
Burroughs 5500, occupied a space half the size of a football field;
the tape drives were the size of refrigerators; the hard drives as
big as washing machines. Students were allowed output to either the
line printer (I haven't seen anything that prints that fast since),
punched tape, or punched cards.  Our only input choice was punched
cards. Not even the grad students (mostly astro.) were allowed anywhere
near the terminal. 

Sean,

who right now is trying to repair a system that refuses to display
the mouse cursor.  It's there, all right, just invisible.

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