Ware Ware Wizardjin (was Re: readline bashing (was POSIX bashing))

[Ed Gould]

>Gee, listening to some wizards, you'd think the bad old days had
>come back when computer time was more important than human time,
>and Herculian feats of engineering were required to make the computer
>do much of anything.

That's not the point at all.  The point is that most of the cycles
used by fancy GUIs don't help productivity - or usability by novices -
at all.  What they do is paint extra goo on the screen, and they
do it badly at that.  There are at least two high-powered systems
for managing bitmapped displays that do not wast all those cycles
(MGR and Plan 9),  Even the Macintosh makes better use of its
graphics and processor resources than does X.  Remember the original
Mac?  It had a fairly slow 68000 (not an '010 or '020) and a *total*
of 128KB of RAM.  A lot of people got very useful work done on it.
Many of them were novices.

-- 
Ed Gould			No longer formally affiliated with,
ed at mtxinu.COM			and certainly not speaking for, mt Xinu.

"I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady.  I'll fight them as an engineer."