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As much as I dislike the whole intro "ive seen it all" listing a do of common stuff, its difficult not to agree on the whole. The state of software is sad. I

• commieneko 15y ago
  I was doing some consulting work at a public library in 1987, and they had several public access Macs. I set up Hypercard on them and started showing people, staff, patrons, kids, winos, how to use it. In 1987 _lots_ of people had never sat down before a computer in their lives. I could spend an hour with someone and have them doing useful things with Hypercard. It was extremely approachable. And I don't just mean doing word processing or drawing pictures, though they were doing that too. They were creating software that solved real problems from their real life. I started out by giving out floppy disks for them to save their "stacks", for them from out of my own pocket. We finally had to start selling them at the circulation desk. The biggest conceptual problems, then as now, were in teaching people how to deal with files in a file system, on multiple volumes/disks, and in making people think in terms of versions of documents (actually applications in this case) and in backing them up. Data loss from exposing the disks to magnetic fields was also a major problem, at least we seem to have conquered that problem...