Aha, we are now in agreement. My original objections were to your statement that

followed by

.

I don't have any authority to back this up, but I suspect most pepole of all ages, even today, have trouble understanding the workings of computers, just as they do electricity or FAX machines. To most people, I suspect, these are simply magic.

Perhaps I saw a different type of "muggles" than you did. While most of the people I supported in the 1970s were in the computer department, some were not. They were generally the "best and the brightest" among the engineers, who used computers to do their jobs as they used every other resource they had access to. They might simulate a piece of hardware, for example, or compute the radiation pattern of an antenna.

Where I worked there were no mechanics, doctors or nurses, and the lawyers stayed in their offices on the top floor. We had secretaries but they didn't use computers.

I needed it to balance my checkbook. Keeping track of my expenses on paper was tedious and error-prone, and I knew computers could do better. That wasn't my only application; as I said, I also used it for word processing.

In the 1970s I didn't know anyone other than myself who had a computer at home. If I had been living in a city, or in Silicon Valley, I probably would have, but in suburban New Hampshire I was unusual. The people I supported in the early 1970s used computers at work. The application programmers coded in Fortran, assembler and COBOL using either punch cards or KSR-33 teletypes. You can't do that by rote. In the late 1970s I worked for DEC, and there we used VT52s, VT100s and their successors connected to various DEC computers to code in Bliss or assembler. The environment was very different, but none of the engineers operated by rote.

What was your situation like?

They were slow and expensive by today's standards, but I don't agree that they didn't do anything the average Joe needed to do. I bought an Apple II for word processing and spreadsheets, Visicalc being the "killer app" for the Apple II. Those are still two of the major uses of personal computers today.

I also don't agree that most adults who used a computer at work did so by rote. That may be true today, but it wasn't true in the 1970s and 1980s. You had to know what you were doing to get any useful work out of those beasts.

It isn't just people who worked in the field. Personal computers began to be popular in the late 1970s. Anyone over the age of 24 who bought an Apple II or Commodore 64 when they first came out would be 60 or over by now. Such people have had a long time to learn about computers.

I agree, but I do think it is reasonable to protect people from other people doing stupid stuff.

You are over-generalizing. Think of the pioneers of the industry: Don Knuth, Nicklaus Wirth, John McCarthy, Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Grace Murray Hopper, and others. They were all doing innovative work after age 60 or (in some cases) are still doing it. If you had told Amazing Grace that she didn't know the difference between a hard drive and the Internet in 1966 (when she turned 60) she would have laughed in your face.

When I was a commercial software developer I did this religiously. Once my supervisor told me “I cannot believe that adding a one-day item to the project causes the delivery date to slip by a day.”

There are two good things that managers do: get their people what they need, and shield them from upper management.

A manager once found us a System/360 with a paper tape punch in Detroit so we could recompile the software we was installing at Michigan Bell. We had to use it on third shift, but it sure beat having to come back to New Hampshire for every bug fix.

A different manager told us that one of the mechanisms he used to shield us from having our priorities changed so frequently that we never got anything completed was "That horse has left the gate." He took the position that once we had gotten a project to a certain point, we were going to complete it and deliver the product, even if Marketing no longer thought it was the most important product we could be working on.

I heard a rumor about the Amiga clock virus when I was an Amiga dealer in the 1990s. I didn't believe it, because I knew that the clock had too little RAM to hold a virus. Your description is much more believable.

Would you be kind enough to share the brand name(s) those USB drives are sold under, or some other way to identify them in the marketplace? I am assuming, of course, that the hardware write switch cannot be defeated by re-flashing the drive's firmware, or, if it can, that firmware flashing is also protected by a physical switch.

A third possibility is that the NSA and their friends abroad might have pressured the manufacturers to remove these security features. The pressure might have subtle, like pointing out "good" places for cost savings.

Historically, that isn't correct. File extensions were invented in the 1960s to distrnguish files for the same program but with a different purpose. For example, I might have a program named FOONLY. It is written in Fortran, so its source file is FOONLY.FOR. When I compile FOONLY.FOR the output of the Fortran compiler is FOONLY.REL. When I link FOONLY.REL the output of the linker is FOONLY.EXE.

In a system like this, hiding the file extensions would be counter-productive.

I first encountered filename extensions in 1966, on a DEC PDP-6. We had 36 bits (six characters) for the file name, and 18 bits (three characters) for the extension. Early extensions were .FOR (for Fortran) and .REL (for relocatable binary). The .EXE extension on executable programs was invented in the late 1960s for the Execute command, which would compile and link your program if your sources were newer than your executable.

Android's version of the kernel is available in source form, and there are rumblings of an effort to integrate it into mainline. Even if this doesn't happen now, it can happen in the future because the source is available, unlike computer manufacturer's proprietary versions of Unix.

I don't know anything about Oracle's kernel, but unless they are violating the GPL their source is also available.