Re: Sort of OT : advice sought to 'teach' Windows basics to technophobe


"J.A. Legris" <jalegris@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1169432515.887479.174460@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Paul E. Schoen wrote:

I remember the first time I used a MAC, when taking a course in
Structured
Programming (Pascal) at the local college, in 1987. I was already adept
at
MSDOS and even CP/M. But it took me a while to adjust to the graphics
windows format. What I had the hardest time with was clicking and
dragging
an icon into the trash can just to remove the icon from the desktop and
close it. To me, it looked like I was deleting it. I hope they have
changed
that to something more intuitive. I don't think I used the computer lab
more than a couple of times. I got a copy of Turbo Pascal for my 8086
Leading Edge and did all my homework at home. Later I switched to Turbo
C,
but now I'm back to Pascal with Borland Delphi.

Paul

If you drag an icon to the trash, that means you probably don't want it
back. There's one exception: you can still drag a CD or DVD into the
trash to eject it from the drive.

I think in this case it was an icon for the 3.5" disk which we used to
store our homework. Putting it in the trash probably just ejected it. But
it just didn't seem right to put it in the garbage can. Maybe GIGO?


But the thing I like about the Mac is that somewhere in the world
there's someone who actually knows how it works. Feels like old times.

I'm learning how to program the thing using the FREE development system
that comes with it. Objective-C. I had given up hope of ever enjoying a
computer again until I took the Mac plunge. I just bought my second
machine over Christmas - a MacBook. Very nice. The only problem so far
is that the beautiful white housing scratches easily. Comes with a
remote control too :)


I like the idea that the operating system is apparently very stable and
immune to viruses (at least those written for the PC). I also thought the
Motorola processor was probably better than the Intel 8086 and its
successors. The 64K segments were a real PITA. I really liked the Zilog
Z80, and wrote many programs in its assembly language (and I still do, for
an embedded Z180, although most of the coding is in C). However, the only
real computer with a Z80 was the Radio Shack Trash-80. I had (and still
have) one of the original Sinclair ZX80s, before I started on my succession
of PCs.

I'm a bit nervous about the new Vista OS for PCs. I need to support over
100 products in the field that use MSDOS and a parallel port interface that
won't run on anything past Win98, so I'm rewriting it, with a hardware
change, for Windows. I just hope that will not also need rewriting for the
next generation of PCs, which seem to be mostly aimed at high-end gaming
and multimedia, rather than true computing requirements.

Paul


.

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