[geeks] Apple software: the stuff you "gotta have"

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Oct 10, 2007, at 4:02 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> One thing too that annoys me is Macs using command where most other
>> interfaces use control.
>>
>> It's probably a better way of doing things because it prevents some
>> conflicts and overloading, but it makes it hell to go to KDE or
>> Windows, where control is used for both movement and things like cut
>> and paste.
>>
>> My brain and fingers will adjust soon, it's just one of those things
>> that is annoying at first.
>
> Eh ...  control, command, winkey, it's all buckykeys  :)

Dude... don't get me started on bang, double-bucky, <comm char> and
that sort of thing.

I still remember reciting that kind of stuff in terminal rooms in the
80s on a regular basis, and scaring off the non-compsci students.  I
used to use a lot of different machines, and local terminal gardens
tend to develop their own local dialects, mixed with ancient hacker
jargon.

I remember this woman writing her biology report in TeX on a Prime.
The Prime wasn't a very friendly machine if you didn't learn it well,
and the school never bothered doing much training on them.  She
wanted to know how to view the output of her last command.  I can't
remember what the sequence was, but involved some colons, splats, and
maybe even a bucky on some of those old terminals.  She just stared
back and said, "What?"  I reached over and typed the command,
explaining it along the way.  She never could remember it, or figure
out how to construct her own.

The next week the same woman was on a UNIX account, trying to do the
same thing, because the admin told her UNIX was more friendly.  Same
thing.  "How do I see the output of the text processing?"

I looked over and said, "bang bang shove pipe more".  :)

After that, we saw her in the PC/Mac lab where she belonged.

Not every non-geek was like that though.  Some of them became
amazingly adept.  The math and physics people generally did well.  Of
course, they had to, but what surprised me was a few history majors
that wrote some pretty complex stuff in scripts and TeX or nroff.

They did stuff I had no idea how to do, involving multiple languages
and some fairly complex indexes and appendix type sections.

--
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com