Usage of WebWorks (ePublisher)

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:32:12 -0600, Patrick Fortino <pxforti at gmail.com> 
wrote:

>But imagine it's 1986 and you are in a computer store looking at 
>computers.

I can't resist.  ;-)  In 1986, I was working at a company that
had pretty much standardized on Macs.  People loved them.  I had
one of the older DOS boxes, with a special drive that allowed
it to read and write Mac disks (for conversion purposes).  Macs 
were so "special" other machines couldn't read the disks at all, 
even at the record level, much less write to them.

>One the hand, you have DOS with it's blinking cursor waiting for  
>instructions from you. If only you knew what those instructions were.

Yes, it did call for knowing what you were doing.  ;-)  But
so did the Mac.  How long did it take *you* to figure out that
the way to eject a floppy, other than the paperclip taped to 
every Mac, was to drag it to the Trash???  This was intuitive?  <bg>

>On the other hand, you have a Mac Plus, it's friendly face and graphic  
>interface inviting you to experiment. Both computers will pretty much  
>do what you want, the big difference being ease of use and cost. Macs  
>were easier to use and cost a LOT more (I'm not trying to start a  
>windows v mac battle here: I use both and think they are now pretty  
>even on ease of use).

Back then, Macs had another interesting feature.  If anything
went wrong during a write to the floppy, a daily event, the
entire disk became unusable.  You discovered this the next time
you inserted your wonderful project, and the Mac offered to
format the "damaged" disk for you.  You could literally hear
the screams from one end of the office to the other.

So on that DOS box, I studied the Mac filesystem on the disks.
After a while I worked out the rules for it (Apple wouldn't
tell you, unlike, say, IBM), and wrote a simple program to
fix up a very common (and harmless) error made by the Mac if
it wasn't totally done with the disk before it was removed.
(It wasn't updating the free list until then, so a block just
written would be in both the used and free lists, and the Mac 
threw up its hands.  I just removed any used blocks from the 
free list and updated it.)

After a while there was a steady stream of folks with tearstained
faces gingerly clutching a floppy coming to my desk.  It took a
few seconds for my program to fix them up.  They went back to
work on the easier-to-use system... much happier.  <vbg>

My point?  It's *not* that easier is worse.  It's that every
tool has its use, and if you master them all, you are better
off than those who limit themselves to one.  Even if you think
it's the easiest.  ;-)

And what did you expect, on Friday afternoon?  <g>

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/