Unix, vi, nroff, and troff for businesses

[dndobrin at athena.MIT.EDU]

1.  "UNIX is expensive."  For 25 users, a UNIX system costs around $2000
    per terminal.  (See recent Computerworld FOCUS.)  True, a PC can be 
    bought for 1K, but when you start adding Microsoft Word and a 3Com
    board and a hard disk, it's actually significantly more expensive.

2.  The more powerful something is, the more difficult it is to learn,
    but, if it's learned well, the more efficiency it produces in the long
    run.  Preferring easy-to-learn but gutless programs is usually 
    short-sighted.  This is true of techies and non-techies.

3.  Personally, I prefer Emacs, but I don't want to start up an old
    fight.  The real trouble with vi, troff, or Emacs is that they
    are unnecessarily hard to learn.  Good training or a decent 
    quick reference card can reduce the learning time to manageable
    proportions.

4.  I don't want to get into WYSIWIG vs. command-driven, but it is clear
    that if people are taught command-driven formatting--by people, by
    the way, I mean secretaries, not techies--they like it.  I am a
    consultant, and I go into many offices, and in some, all the 
    secretaries use UNIX, vi, and troff.  At Addison-Wesley, all the
    salespeople format their letters with TeX.  Obviously, this 
    requires some forethought;  you can't have everybody in the office
    reinventing formats all the time.  But if you prepare some standard
    ones, command-driven formatting works reasonably well.

5.  The basic advantage of vi (or Emacs) and troff besides power has not
    been mentioned.  It is that you're dealing with ASCII files.  In
    a networked environment where archives must be kept, this is
    significant.  No mucking around trying to strip off the Control-L's.