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Red Hat Diaries/004a

Life as a user

I've never been a computer user before. Seriously. Only a computer programmer. And in every MS environment I have ever worked in, there has been a recognisable need to change and to eradicate. To change what is there, and to eradicate what is unnecessary.

But it was fun. Radsoft started because a number of exceptionally gifted programmers had to start using PCs with MS-DOS on them. They came from a variety of environments, including MVS and Unix. MS-DOS was nothing. A hardware interface at best. It gave you nothing, and did little more than make your disks spin. If we were going to do some serious development on that platform, we needed more.

And so RIX System was born. Leaving only six MS-DOS files on disk, we replaced what had been there with over fifty new utilities of our own, including full screen text mode (mode 3) editors for text, hex, screen dumps, directory editing, cluster editing, disk sector editing, font editing, and more. We worked hard and we ended up with something that was good enough for application development on the PC.

When Windows came along, we found ourselves in the same situation. Holes in functionality everywhere. Gradually we put together enough tools to make Win16 something we could live with. When Microsoft announced Windows 95, the greatest event in the history of the planet since the dinosaurs, we transitioned again - and this time ended up with what today is called Extreme Power Tools. As NT came into the fore, we added tools specific for that platform as well.

And we programmed, and we taught; but we never 'used' the computers. None of us - certainly not yours truly - ever ever ever experienced a computer from an end-user point of view.

Not until now.

If I were tinkering around on a Linux platform, I would probably want a lot of spurious experimental software, simply because Linux is a 'tinkering' environment. I might or might not need it, but I would surely want it.

If I am in the Belly of the Beast on a Windows box, I need the full power of Extreme Power Tools just to survive. It's not a question of wanting to tinker, it's a direct question of survival. Without the XPT you simply cannot keep a Windows box going. Windows is that terrible.

For that matter, I would venture to guess that about 80-95% of all ISV products for Windows fall into the same category: stuff you have to have because Microsoft Windows is so shitty. Firewalls because Windows is so vulnerable. Intrusion detection systems because Windows is a veritable worm farm. Registry cleaners because Windows makes JavaScript look like nitro-glycerin. System cleaners like E3 Security Kit because both Windows itself and Windows add-on software is written so poorly.

But you don't get that feeling on OS X 10.2. You don't feel like there's something missing that ought to be there. You don't have gaping holes and wobbly system modules. You really have almost - if not everything - you need.

Part of the reason is that you have Unix underneath. You can at any time drop into a console and do anything you want. The Unix setup - FreeBSD - is complete. Many sysadmins and netadmins would contend you need no more.

And yet 10.2 is so well built and designed that you won't need that console window very often. Almost everything you could want to do in a console can today be done in Aqua. And Aqua makes it feel so much easier.

You have a very good process manager; you have a network bundle; you have an even more acceptable file system browser; you have a very fancy email client; you have an address book, a chat program, several Aqua-based editors - about all I could possibly claim was lacking would be a hex editor and a disk editor. That's about it.

But I really don't need either of those programs right now - I'm just a user, and a rather happy one at that.

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