Re: Apple Computers-collector's items?

[wohlford@teleport.com (dew)]

In article <4up2uq$et4@darla.visi.com>, Nathan Mates <nathan@visi.com> wrote:
>In article <gabrielr-1208962039100001@ts35-11.wla.ts.ucla.edu>,
>Gabriel Rossman <gabrielr@ucla.edu> wrote:
>>I don't care if its flamebait, I stick to my opinions and here's why.
>
>   I *KNOW* that this is a flame, but you've got your head rammed
>pretty far up your ass, and I'm going to point it out in embarrasing
>detail. By the way, the proper English contraction of "it is" is
>"it's," not what you wrote. But, being a blockhead about English is
>the very least of your problems.
>
[...stuff deleted...]

>   Since Basic is so useless, all the people who grew up on Apple IIs
>when they were real popular and used Basic and Machine Language (two
>of the languages hated by snobby CS types who think they encourage bad
>programming style... you program in the style that the language pushes
>you into, not the other way around) must be totally crippled in this
>modern world of only C++, right? Hell no. They learned to program, and
>they learned to program _well_, and have adapted to more modern
>techniques as they were paid to do so. A large chunk of the programmers
>where I work (writing video games for very nice money) learned on
>Apple IIs, and they still like them. 
>

Well, that is a canonical flame, but Nathan made a good
point.  I started programming on the Apple IIe computers
at my grammar school.  I learned BASIC and some assembly from
the books in the library and had graduated to Pascal by the
time I reached grade school.  Programmed on Mac's in high
school and by the time I was in college I was fairly handy
with C.  Then I learned Scheme, ML, etc. and programmed on Sparcs,
Sequent boxes and PC's.  

As Nathan said, I learned to hack -- and hack well -- on just about
any box with just about any OS.  Yes, I prefer a Unix box and
run FreeBSD at home.  I work under Win32 at work, but dual boot
with FreeBSD.  My poor old Mac Classic is too out of date to be
much use anymore, but I used to do some neat stuff on it.  And
I still have an Apple IIgs sitting on my desk which is soon to be
revived.  

I think Scott Addams got it right when he alluded to the "holy wars"
of machine/OS.  Do we really need to thumbscrew someone if
they like using MacOS/Win95/OS2/Unix/etc.?  Now, if this is an
office environment and someone is making a bad choice given the
needs, then by all means put up a well-reasoned fight.  Hell,
start an underground movement.  At my company we have the
Unix underground.  It's mostly just a bunch of us who have been
covertly installing FreeBSD-type OSes when we're supposed to be
running WinNT or Win95.  We get our work done, and we get to have
fun pulling one over on the "others".

Well, I've sucked up enough bandwidth for the evening.

Pax lemmatai,

dew