Time for 8 bit news, isn't it? - Haven't got the slightest

[Tom Fitzgerald]

p576spz at mpirbn.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de (S.Petra Zeidler) writes:
> It is the US American "We Are The World, all the others are just the
> miserable exotic rest" attitude all over again.
> Believe me, there is a world, and yes, even netting outside of the US

Yes, we know.  I've heard that song before, but you really should start from
the beginning:

Eu:  What a great peice of software!  I want to run it on my machine in Europe,
     can I have a copy?

Am:  But it was written as a quick hack for an American environment, and it
     has hard-coded English strings in it and...

Eu:  That's OK, it's worth it, I want it anyway.

Am:  But it uses 12-hour time and a 7-bit character set and has hard-coded
     case-conversion tables.  Really, it was a quick hack that I wrote on
     my own time and give away for free.  The real version will have...

Eu:  That's OK, I can use it right now, it's worth it.

Am:  OK, here it is.

<later>

Eu2: What a great peice of software!  How translatable is it?

Eu:  Not at all.  Damn Americans don't know how to code for the International
     marketplace.

This has happened with everybody's favorite word processing software,
networks, e-mail and now news.  It would be wonderful if all this stuff
was perfectly configurable for all national environments, but when you're
doing a quick hack because you need to get things between a few machines
in the same neighborhood, or you need to get a peice of software out the
door before the venture capital runs out, things like this get put off
until the second pass.  Software has an American orientation because most
of it was written by Americans, and most of the marketplace was American.
I'm quite aware this is less true than it was, and soon won't be true at
all, and this is a good thing.  Historical vistiges remain.

The best way to help this along is to work on the patches that the news
software, for one, will need to be international.

---
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs        fitz at wang.com
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA   ...!uunet!wang!fitz