Re: Any programmers that can use Delphi for text-based outli

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 811

Posted by dmason
2000-11-03 10:06:54

I doubt that writing an outliner for Windows would require the kind of hours that must have gone into PCO/DOS, apparently done in assembly language. Instead of all the relatively high-level calls available in modern O/S and languages like Delphi etc. the original programmer must have sweated out a really big heap of details. Getting it all to run reasonably fast on an 8088 with floppy disks seems even more remarkable today than it did then.

There does seem to be a wide streak of conservatism in the software field. After a few “killer apps” emerged a lot more effort went into variations on these few themes - word processing, spreadsheets, databases - than on fresh new ideas. For example mapping/GIS was a PC natural that easily could have gone big-time about 1985, yet it wasn’t mass-marketed until about 1995. Personal finance packages like Quicken weren’t conspicuous until about 1990. Probably what we’re experiencing is schlepping through this kind of cold molasses. Gotta keep truckin’!

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