[ale] Some days are worse than others

[Jim Lynch]

Sean Kilpatrick wrote:

>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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UVA by any chance?

Jim