Unix, vi, nroff, and troff for businesses
dndobrin at athena.MIT.EDU
dndobrin at athena.MIT.EDU
Thu Sep 11 01:15:53 AEST 1986
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.
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