Some of the ideas that came out of the early computing times make much more sense than the current range of 'innovations'. Most pay-ware is legacy stuff on shipping, and eventually you move from dedicated programs for doing X to well-thought-out programs that use some sort of open idiom (like spreadsheets).

I use REXX. My tendency is to use cross-platform stuff because the operating system could change from DOS to OS/2 to Windows, or whatever. Regina REXX is to be had on all platforms. Code i wrote back in the 1990's still work reliably today. Programs i used back in the 1990s have to be ever updated. A number of utilities do not have to be compiled. You can have a fancy program that factorises numbers, and then construct the number to factorise in rexx, and run the command from inside rexx, eg 'factor' me You can even have factor set to a variable, as in factor="c:\utils\factor.exe" and then write the line "factor me" without the quotes, and it will string these strings together, and run "c:\utils\factor.exe 1727999" at the prompt.

Essentially, one is going to find examples of printed code, like fortran or rexx, which one can import without modification. My recollection is that fortran does not require one to think too hard about variable kinds. A chemist is a chemist, not a computer science graduate. He's more interested in formalderhides than data type declarations.

I suppose that when terminals cost the price of houses, and the computers lived in air-conditioned pens with white-coats at hand, and boas under the floor, computing time was scarse.

Technology depends on how far one lives out from the main stream. I used punched cards and paper tape when i went through my course in the seventies. I used a teletype machine at work, it had a fairly large recriprocating mass, it used to "walk".

Still, it amuses me to think back then we talked about 'Automatic Data Processing' (ADP), but every bit was expensive and one spent a good deal of trying to get as much information into the available data space. Now-days, data is cheap, and everyone calls it "Information Technology". Its rather silly really. Most IT people spend their time pouring data from one jug to another, with little regard to 'information' or how to optimise things.

I still know how to find the main cycles of a program and bum speed out of it. You did that in the ancient days, and because i wanted to run the cycle a couple of thousand millions of times, it is of some profit to do this even today.

I have been using these letters since i was at high school, say early 1970s. I tried out ð too, but Modern english represents both of these by a single letter 'th'. One has ick and in, weaer or neier. It's in alphabets already, there's no need for a new rune when its been with us years. Writing "ðe" for "e" is like writing "as" as "az", and other 'newspeak' idioms.

Writing orn is pretty easy, and you get to learn to keep the ascenders on p quite short. Other than that, one gets people who get confused with is. I had a comment or three to the effect that "all of my ths come out like 'p's". I usually respond along the lines of trying to enquire about whether they were Non-English-Speaking Background or something.

The letter has existed for quite some time. A recent tome in the post 'archelogical papers', bought for yet another OE thing that most folk have long forgotten (the long hundred = counts by 120), has a church registery, with the likes of 'Richard, ye son of Peter and Mary', where ye is a form of e the capital looks something like an I, with a rod coming from the middle to 1 o'clock.

The 'polygloss as nature intended' on my website, is constructed in thorns, it's quite an 'easy read', and does not look too ugly. There are some 'th' in there, because some words have a separate t and h, eg the name Wythoff, which is Wyt (white) + hoff (yard). A simple s/th// does not work. The two polygloss pages are based on the same code, made up in a homg-growm markup. `T and `t are th becoming , 'f and `F are always , and `D `d are always Th th. This allows one to search the code for "th" and correct these on demand.

I worked on both sides of the help-desk in my time.

Being a computer whizz back then, one is asked of members how to do this or do that. One gets 'programming projects', to pretty-print and sort the download docs, and to Y1999 fix proggies. Still. One acquires a reputation from the newtork lads, because while the fixes work, they were not really in accord with the network aims.

On the other side, one gets to see the strange sort of things users do. They look strange, some work and some dont. Network people see boxes as swappable things, not places where users hide things. Some of the things i used to do there (like drop live icons on the user's desktops), sort of horrified them, but it saved a walk, and a good deal of time.

The ruling is that while it is not illegal for an individual to do this for his own benefit, it is illegal for a company to do it to onsell the service.

I looked at PowerShell. It makes me no sense.

Unix and REXX grew up based on things that people actually needed, rather than dictated ex citidel. To this end, once one has a UI (in the form of STDIO), it's easy to write stream filters. I write quickies for this in REXX. Strongly typing means that you can only treat a file name as a file name, rather than say, a string. It also means that you can't add 1 and 1..

Still, those of us who have lives in the real world do fine-tune things with a spanner etc, such as to give some more gain to the victa or level the fridge. So the notion of a spanner and screw-driver for configure (ie adjust), has still some sense. Also, there's the delightful phrase 'spanner in the works'. This is just the dandy place to do it (i recall one girl changing all of the window furniture to blue, and then wondered why she couldn't see anything!).

One should remember that the hard disk icon is sometimes shown as a stack of platters, and sometines as a grey box, but in one instance, the hard drive is not the volume, and secondly, not many people would pick out the fixed disks in a beige box. It's also interesting to see what people would think of floppy-disk icons when floppies aren't allowed at work.

Still, there are steam engines used to show level crossings, because of all things railway, the steam engine is perfectly recognisable.

As to the rabbit ears on the tele, that's about the most distinct thing about it, and even TiVo uses it in their logo.

I used to have a real teletype behind me at work, to do queries. The thing would chug into life every now and then with the answer to some command entered into a computer. One would type in a card line (rather like command options in the cobol style), and it would send back a string of lines.

The joys of the card punch and the tape punch. These chug away, likewise mounted so that their vibrations would not do some damage.

The sound of bells relaying messages, when BEL actually rang a bell. Of course there (was) the telephone system i saw my brother use, to ring up control at roma, consists of a party-line system, where one rings long-long-long etc.

Here (australia), it was the custom to play the national anthem (god save the queen), at the end of every show (cinema, live, television close). In the seventies, they changed it to some other thing (advance australia fair). One day not too long ago, i was listening to a disk of national anthems, and found that i was standing when GSTQ was played. So ingrained. (They used GSTQ to get the beatles out of an adelaide theatre: the beatles made their exit as the audience stood at attention to higher things).

Real money. not a sound, but the cash registers and so forth were generally mechanical things where one might press the money in and pull a lever. Australia abandoned currency on 14 feb 1966, when we got these decimal beads in.

The real thing with e-mail etc is that one ought treat it as an electronic inbox, and not something to dance to every beck and call.

One works on a variety of tasks, rifling the inbox for the next task. It's the same with inbox stuff. You might assess incoming tasks for urgency and importance, but if you jumped to every task as it hits the desk, ye'd never get nothing done.

It should be remembered that efficency and effectiveness generally are unrelated.

Efficiency is something that can be measured: responces to calls, forms processed, etc, the sort of thing you can count. It's pretty easy to do this sort of thing, and often the PHBs will take some metric and use it as a measure of activity. Because of this, one often sees things like proformance indicators, and the process and often salary, becomes connected to the indicator. The industry stops being what it is and starts producing 'red beans' for the bean counters. The indicator changes, and one produces blue beans.

Effect is something that is about getting the right job done, both for the customer and for the system. It's not even about what the customer wants, since this supposes that it is the role of the customer to diagnose the problem and the solution, and simply ask for the solution to happen. One needs to think of what happened with the system that responded to cyclone Katrina in New Orleans, which the responce was based on customer wants, rather than pre-assessment by those who should have done this. A call for help is an indicator to a problem, not a proposed solution.

Of course, even though an indicator might be proportional to effect in the wild, when it is proportional to money, the indicator becomes more important to the effect. A doctor, who might have an indicator on consultations, will split several illnesses to several consultations. On a help desk, one is more intent on creating calls, then on providing effect. A call that seeks three problems would be terminated at the first, and new calls needed for the second and third. Also, the process might be extended to several calls to create extra indicator traffic.

In the main, help desk traffic is not a really good indicator of effect, since there are things that effect this. Response time, time to fix, etc, all serve to alter traffic, in some cases, it might be better served by the section guru rather than the help desk. The effectiveness of the guru's solutions may well impede the help desk's overall issues, since it might make matters worse.

One should also note that recording the help calls is also an impediment. It serves no effect, and in many cases, might take as much to make happen as the call does in nature. One might answer say, 90% of the calls first up, yet spend more than 50% of the times making the necessary beans for the counter. A good deal of issues can be condensed into a few batch files (yes, i did this: system configuration is a good candidate for script files), so that while the call is terminated relatively fast, the actual recording might be tedious.

My experience of help desk is that particularly Microsoft rograms (eg Word, Access, Windows), use common names, which makes them very hard to grep for in the system. This reduces the effectiveness of any sort of 'search the job tables' for help. To this end, i used Wart, Abcess, Windoze, much to the annoyances of the PHBs.

Still print because my copy of vproof (proof-reader proggie) does not really work on the screen.

I make use of style sheets as much as possible. This allows for example, either block or first-line indent. With a style-sheet set down to character-level, one can use single or double-spaces freely at the end of a sentence. The markup language I wrote (KML, see, eg http://www.os2fan2.com/ makes use of a chacter-level style sheet that replaces eg `t and `T by th,TH or , respectively, eg 'the polygloss' vs 'the polygloss as nature intended', both derive from the same source KML file.

One uses also two kinds of paragraph (p) and (pp), to create leading vs following paragraph. The pp-style paragraph can have either first-line indent (traditional) vs blank-line block style.