I accept your clarification, with the stipulation that such clarification was indeed required. That said, I do apologise for my thin skin on this subject. I took a Hell of a lot of ribbing on 1st January 2000 and have taken much since, and it does eventually wear one down. Ah, well; nusquam licitum inritus irritus attero. Russ Zen network engineer: "What's the bandwidth of localhost?" »

Hrmph! As one of those who spent nearly a decade in the trenches preparing for that "non-existent bug," more aptly called a serious lack of forethought, I take serious umbrage at your flippancy. While the NSF policy of replacing all their stuff that was not provable as Y2K compliant was ridiculous (A VCR with no year field in its clock, for instance, is inherently any-year compliant; fortunately they didn't toss all their furniture and dishes as well) there were some extremely serious issues to be resolved. I'll grant you that there was a great deal of pontificating, and that the depredations of the "experts" are hard to overstate, but the blokes behind the scenes were, are and deserve better than a casual dismissal. That Y2K was not the End of all Civilisation was not the proof of a negative (a logical impossibility) that you make it out to be, but rather was the result of countless person-years spent mitigating it. We did our part, and we did it with little thanks, no impressive memorials erected in our collective honour and with the ignorant laughing in our faces. Please laugh in some other direction. Russ Bixby, Curmudgeon of the plains. "Why is there an expiration date on buttermilk?" »

Wow. That's a excellent little vignette and a great suggestion for the killer application. That said, I suppose that I fear change. My mind was honed pouring over assembly programmes, optimising them for size and speed. If I could shave a few instructions, I might take another block (half K) off the image size, a significant consideration when the entire storage was one 35 MB washing machine. While the "real programme" has been obscured since creation of the first compiler, I find the idea of "programming" in "PDL" to be truly alien, and a bit freakish. I'd draw a parallel to modern electronics (especially digital) in which there is no fixed, discrete design. While 'twould be truly miraculous to be able to ask my computer to create an ad hoc application based upon my whim of the moment, a part of me will always long for the source listing. We will have lost something important. We will have also gained more than we lost, but there will still be the ache of amputation. Ah well, the tyrannosaur was likely no fan of progress. Cheers, Russ Bixby, geek of the plains "What's the bandwidth of localhost?" »