From: "roger day" <[log in to unmask]>

"
Nyuck. Macos X is a nice clean UNIX with a carbuncle on the side (and
don't -ask- about the Carbon API and the HFS stuph - just too messy for
words - half an integration is not as good as noo integration). I still
don't understand that hangover from CDE with added -expanding- tool icons. I
mean, all because you can apply transform matrices in a slick way, doesn't
mean you should. OTOH, it doesn't crash as often as the rest of the Macs.
"

OK, know when I'm outclassed -- score five for you.

But I +was+ fairly heavily into OS9. Not the robotics stuff -- that was for
the professionials.

But on my best day, I ported a C prog of Tower of Hanoi from the Yanks to
the Dragon 64 {Trash80 Welsh clone}

... and got paid £75 [best money I +ever+ made from writing] for "Serial
File Programming on the Dragon 34."

[Totally spaghetti, admittedly, but I did mix in file-pointers. Saved some
code in the days (pre-Gatesworld) when tightcoding COUNTED. Shit, my first
computer was a ZX80, and that had one K of memory. You wrote tight code or
you didn't code at all ...

Kids nowadays ...]

Quiche-eaters like me did it with audio-cassettes ...

Sometime, longtime, never again, old chug.

Robin

POME

(a sixties thing, but mine own):

THE SEMIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF THE (ELECTRONIC) MOUSE IN THE
WAINSCOATING

He lived on radio waves among the plastic furnishings.
He once acted as a sniffer-out of illicit wavelengths for the CIA.
He listened to and occasionally retransmitted broadcasts.
His guts were a length of recording wire.
He wasn't often seen and then only on purpose.
We called him Smartalec as that seemed to humanise him a little.
He used to perch on the cradle by the baby's ear and out of his nose came
sound and in his eyes the baby learned to beware of advertising.
He had a nervous time when he first ran out of programing, but soon came to
depend on the learning-factor whkh had been built into him.
He crossed the Atlantic in a stratojet and for a time was adviser to the
President.
His scream was the sound of electric guitars, and when he whispered, you had
to decode the high frequency waves.
He talked in Algol and Fortran to the household computer, and taught it
compassion and humanity and even a little humour.
He once became drunk on a pirate commercial station and spent five hours
explaining that he was the illicit son of Marshall McLuhan.
When he died we closed his eyes with a light pencil and tied two used
dry-celll batteries to his hind legs and wrapped him in a copy of Time/Life
and dropped him down the garbage chute.
We occasionally hear his ghost speaking from the unmanned satellites among
the stars.