[rescue] SUN PCMCIA SBus Card

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sun, 27 May 2018, Dave McGuire wrote:

>  This tickled a memory.  No offense, but you've also proclaimed that
> the user experience with the IBM 5250 is awful.

I don't think that was me.  The administrative experience isn't that great
unless you're an all-IBM shop, and my experience is more with 3270-lineage
terminals than 5250s, but I like the 3270 experience at lot.

The biggest complaint I have with both is that (before tn3270/tn5250),
neither architecture scales down as well as terminals do on the
open-systems side of the industry.  System->cable->terminal.  Done.  Not
so in the IBM world, apart from the console.

A lot of benefits come with terminal controllers and the rest of IBM's
complexity, but the complexity is non-optional.  This is parallel to my
complaint with Emacs.

>  They're just not YOUR favorite tools or mesh well with what YOU do.
> And that's ok.

Exactly so.  If all my tools plugged into Emacs, I'd appreciate it a lot
more.  But it's really just a whole lot of tooling for a transitory text
editor.  I'd be way more into it if emacsclient could phone-home over the
network, but that's not what client-server emacs is designed for.

That said, when an environment can really lean on all that infrastructure
(SLIME, haskell-mode, and the legacy Mathematica mode  come to mind), it's
a beautiful synergy.

Most of the time, though, I just want to hammer out some code, and all the
rest of Emacs is overhead.

>  Yup.  And the only things worse than crap like that are the morons who
> think that software cannot be written without them.  "Duh, Where do I
> click to make my program go??"

My Dad used to complain about a particular sort of mechanic that came up
in my generation.  He called them "parts-swappers."  He'd rebuild a
transmission; a parts-swapper would swap it out.  At some economies of
scale and severity of repair, replace vs fix makes more sense, but if
someone who doesn't know *how* to fix it can't make that call.

Java, PHP, and JavaScript brought up a generation of library-swappers.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA