Doc,
Funny you should say that, I was recently talking with a friend about 3.1, Norton desktop & old versions of Excel & Word. In some ways, I think things have gone backwards since then. Some very non-teckie people where doing great things on PCs back then - even secretaries were producing word, wordperfect, excel & lotus macros. The great thing about those early versions is they continually empowered users & challenged them to do really surprising things.
Starting with NT, things changed. It became all about empowering admins & programmers, sometimes to the detriment of users. Today for most users, a computer has become a fancy typewriter & web browser. For a short period, it was much more than that. I find that PC networks are becoming more mainframe like all the time. All those mainframe encumbrances that frustrated us & we were overjoyed when they were eliminated are coming back. Being a long-term mainframe programmer, I kind of expected this because I knew these constraints were important but I hoped for something different.
Those old systems even ran faster on those ancient machines. Every version of Windows seems to demand an order of magnitude increase in hardware & yet still runs slower than the last version. You run like crazy but you keep moving backwards. For me, the truth is that other than web stuff, my core usage of Windows/Office has not really changed in maybe 15 years or more.
PS: I loved Norton Desktop, I am not sure but didn’t Win95 have a Norton Desktop version too. I seem to remember buying it.
PS2: Not everything has moved backwards. For maybe 25 years or more, I have been a big time SAS user & every time a new version comes out I can not wait for the upgrade because every upgrade so far has empowered me more than the previous version. I even find myself cannibalizing mainframe SAS code that I wrote 20 years ago for my current projects. Does anything MS has produced meet this standard? (Maybe KixTart meets this standard of continuing improving empowerment).
_________________________
Jack
