I'm sure they were out there (probably writing anti-Mac magazine articles), but I didn't know anyone with a Mac who looked back from the introduction of USB. It was superior in every way! It was mere months before I had all the USB adapters I needed...the parallel->USB converter I still use to this day and never - not once since it was first used on my Blue and White "Yosemite" G3 Mac - have I needed to load a driver for it. :) (Oddly, it did come with a driver CDROM.)

Confirmed! It was a long time before the PC people I know grudgingly started switching to USB. GRUDGING! No respect for something that's actually superior. ;)

To make your analogy complete, all or most of those hammers would have to be so esoteric in design that a layman couldn't even tell where to put his hand!

When in fact, every one of those hammers is meant to be used by the layman! It takes experience (10,000 hours, some say) to become expert with any one of them!
Or to look at it another way, I can pick up a peening hammer and whack a nail in with it just fine. Wrong tool, wrong job, but I can make it work with almost zero instruction.

By contrast, I can't even tell you how to install modern programming environment, let alone how to program even BAD software with one! BASIC on the 8-bit computers was the opposite. Doing nothing more After hours (maybe minutes) of dicking with someone else's program in a magazine, after doing nothing more than turning on the device, you were able to create some interesting programs of your own!

The perspective is supposed to be from that of the microcomputer revolution, which was to have ended that elitism of mainframe and minicomputer "once and forever".

Programming, as a field, is still (apparently) in lock-step with that elitism....evidenced all over this thread! LOL.

It must be very easy to imagine oneself as "An Elite Programmer" and one's programming problems as "the sum of Programming".

I'm a little surprised that it's so hard for so many folks - even if you ARE "elite" - to imagine the layman and his possible computing problems.

Best post! LOL

Every personal computer owner could be a computer programmer with from 2 hours to 2 weeks of training. Sometimes less!

I get what you are saying, but you're looking at the wrong paradigm and imagining the wrong use-cases.

I don't need to be a trained plumber to unclog the wife's bathroom sink drain once a month, or even to replace some of the basic plumbing fixtures in the house. If plumbing were like software developing, I would need to be - but not for safety, or any "good reason"...just because the tools themselves were so complicated to use!

You've got it backwards and upside down.

The point is that you shouldn't have to be able to design an engine just to be able to drive a car. If you design your tool to be used only by an elite, then you've failed in the mission we're talking about.

And your example of the spreadsheet is actually a good one! Visicalc was created in the same spirit as BASIC. Not as a tool for a professional - there were already accounting packages and such for them - but one that would be easy enough for people to use even just to balance their checkbook. Which many did!

If you happen to be that "very annoyed power user" then how about "the world doesn't have to revolve around you 365 days a year, you already have tons of tools to choose from, so shut your pie hole and wait for the next hundred programming articles that are just for you!" ;) I'm also sorry, if that's you, because that was a little harsh. ;) ;)

Specifically, BASIC was perfect for what it was....neither nerfed nor limited in scope. In addition to other features it had like instant-on, my "BASIC development environment" - an Atari 800 - was far more capable than my needs dictated and performed as expected (crash free). Something I can't say about any modern platforms....development or otherwise.

Of course there really are no modern parallels to built-in BASIC running on a bullet-proof old 8-bit computer like the Atari or Commodore.

The entire universe of "development tools" has been catering to your (the "pro") every whim for decades and continues to do so....can you get over yourself for the span of one article on /.?

Just because you don't want to be an amateur programmer, doesn't mean nobody wants to. And just because you lack the imagination to see a use-case for amateur programming doesn't mean there are none.

LOL

If the mid-1980's is "the old days"...

...then all you had to do to program was own a personal computer and be able to flick an ON switch...

Bam: you're in a BASIC interpreter.

Source code for whole programs to copy or steal from were never further away than a magazine at the corner store.

As with any true art, the way I (and probably most) learned starting out was copying the work of others....programs were printed line-by-line for the express purpose of copying in most of the popular computer magazines of the day down at the corner drugstore. Compute! was my favorite, but there were a lot. You simply cannot get an experience of learning programming today that's this easy....there aren't any computers set up that way! First you have to set up your development enviro....wha??? Bye, bye amateurs! You have to become somewhat expert just to choose what language to begin with!

I coded plenty of my own apps for household use back then and probably would have continued if the amateur-programmer meme had not been swept up and lost in the zeitgeist. There was brief hope at the beginning of the Web Age that HTML could be a sort of second-BASIC or Hypercard, but the "pros" took over HTML in short order and HTML coding-tools were never integrated into any OS the way BASIC was a part of those old computers in the 1980's.

Web applications like TikiWiki.org are about the only hope now, but are still orders of magnitude more complex than getting into BASIC.

It's also remarkable how "us vs them" many of the commentators on this thread seem to be about a class of "amateur programmers" that hasn't existed in any real form since the late 80's/early 90's.

It's like a slightly comical form of gloating or something.

The web, by definition, is the sum of its parts....so it's EXACTLY this kludgy....and worse.

Just when you think the shit has hit the fan, everyone goes shopping.

Download Google Earth and get the extension that shows all orbiting satellites (including junk). It's pretty startling how much crap has been shot up into space and just left there.

It makes a good reminder of how stupid some things are that seem to make so much sense at the time we're doing them.

-Matt

Then China targets the moon? It may take them longer, but I fail to see how that's better.

-Matt

That's a shallow view of the past, at best. At worst, you may be wearing poop-colored-glasses! ;)

Apple had a superior product in the Apple I and II (etc)! Apple again had a superior product in the Mac.

The only reason Apple didn't keep flogging the Apple I system forever is that THEY KILLED IT with their next superior product.

It's a little more questionable if the Mac will be killed off completely, but the IOS system is clearly having the same effect as the Mac had on the Apple I system back in it's day.

So that they have style (or not) is another question entirely - it certainly entered the scene at some point. But they DO have a long track record of superior products AND BRINGING THEM SUCCESSFULLY TO MARKET. (They have a long list of copycats, detractors, naysayers and FUD'ers that go all the way back to Day 1 too....some of whom made if even bigger than Apple for a while.)

-Matt

P.S. Not every product Apple released was outright superior, of course, but I didn't take that as your point either.

Everything spot-on!

You did forget to mention that they established Windows by essentially dumping the product on the market, benefitting from rampant piracy of Windows and more or less preventing anyone from making money developing a competing OS. (MSDOS was so bad that it made this an easy play...certainly nothing they'd want to stop or curtail.)

This is what built the Windows monopoly. If piracy wasn't such an easy option, I doubt Windows would ever have achieved critical mass.

Sure you COULD pay for Windows back then, but if you DID pay for windows you were called a "CIO".

Today we call those same people "14%-ers".

-Matt