Re: Apple Computers-collector's items?

[rickr@is.rice.edu (Rick Russell)]

In article <gabrielr-1208962039100001@ts35-11.wla.ts.ucla.edu>,
Gabriel Rossman <gabrielr@ucla.edu> wrote:
> them for every subject. The fact is that a kid who knows that it takes 10
> minutes to initialize a disk, writes fluent BASIC, doesn't know what a
> hard drive is, and has never heard of MS Word or Excel is going to find
> that the skills he learned in school have little to no use in the real
> world.
...

If the "real world" is the secretarial pool, I might agree with you.

If the "real world" is college, then you could not be more
wrong. Understanding the basic operation of computers -- the
communication between processor and memory; the concepts of bits,
bytes, binary arithmetic and pointers; serial, parallel and disk I/O,
etc are critically important in science, engineering and (of course)
computer programming.

I mean, just what is an Excel-trained biologist going to do when faced
with the prospect of writing an analysis program for data retrieved
from an 8-bit data acquisition device hooked to a mass spectrometer?
Excel can solve some easy problems, but there's no Excel plug-in for
the hard problems.

Rick R.