[rescue] SUN PCMCIA SBus Card

[Dave McGuire]

On 05/27/2018 05:20 PM, Jonathan Patschke wrote:
>> B This tickled a memory.B  No offense, but you've also proclaimed that
>> the user experience with the IBM 5250 is awful.
> 
> I don't think that was me.B  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.

  Ok, I could certainly be wrong, and if I am, I apologize.  I could've
sworn that you and I were discussing AS/400s here on this list sometime
in the past couple of years, and you mentioned something about "the
awful 5250 user experience" and it really stuck with me.  Because that's
not at all how many people who sit (or sat) in front of an AS/400
terminal all day, every day saw them.

  One recent one that I picked up, from a county government building in
a terrifyingly religion-obsessed region in southwest Ohio, was
particularly fun.  A handful of older ladies came scurrying down to the
loading dock because they'd been told that "someone had come to get
'their 400'".  They looked at the young guy who swapped it out for some
overgrown Windows toy with great disdain, and made me promise to take
good care of "their 400".  I will never forget that, it was hilarious!

  In reality there's very little difference between 3270 and 5250; even
the wire protocols are similar.  IBM was great at re-using things with a
"toolbox" approach, but now always!

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

  *shrug*  Mainframes are complex things that are used for complex
tasks.  You set up a given terminal controller once, and it may be in
another city or even country.  It's not really any more complicated than
setting up [drum roll please] what YOU (and I) are used to setting up.
Beefy UNIX systems tend to baffle most mainframers too.  (Just like
emacs vs. vi, I run both and interact with both communities, so I feel
qualified to make that statement.)

>> B They're just not YOUR favorite tools or mesh well with what YOU do.
>> And that's ok.
> 
> Exactly so.B  If all my tools plugged into Emacs, I'd appreciate it a lot
> more.B  But it's really just a whole lot of tooling for a transitory text
> editor.

  But it's not "a transitory text editor".  It can be used for that,
especially now (emacs starts up every bit as quickly as vi on all of my
current systems...that wasn't the case 20 years ago), but it's been a
programming editor from day one.  Emacs just wasn't conceived for
throwing entries in /etc/hosts.

  I sometimes plug my tools into emacs, but most of the time I start it
up and spend the next ten hours writing code.  Very happily. =)  *swoon*

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

  For the way YOU use a programming editor, yes.  That's not usually the
case for "emacs people", which is why they are "emacs people".  Nobody
is forcing you to accept that supposed overhead, even if today it only
really exists in terms of some spent disk space.

  ...Wow.

  Look, I mentioned emacs vs. vi as a joke.  I honestly thought the
world was over that crap by now, but apparently it isn't.  I'm sorry for
even having brought it up.  This debate, and these EXACT same arguments,
have been rehashed ad infinitum, ad nauseum by hordes of people since
the 1980s.  Only the venue has changed.  I suggest that we drop it.

>> B Yup.B  And the only things worse than crap like that are the morons who
>> think that software cannot be written without them.B  "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.B  He called them "parts-swappers."B  He'd rebuild a
> transmission; a parts-swapper would swap it out.B  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.

  Yes.  [vomit]  But I am thankful for those kids, because their
cluelessness and shoddy work keeps me in nice consulting work. :)

             -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA