Ware Ware Wizardjin

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <12535 at pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> kemnitz at gaia.berkeley.edu (Greg Kemnitz) writes:
>I suppose some of us miss the days of yore when computers were the altars
>through which the common people worshipped us, rather than being things that
>the "common people" use to get their work done.  We may look down our noses
>at those who think a device driver has something to do with auto racing, and
>for whom the options to IOCTL are not the stuff of mortal feuds, but they are
>the people who pay our salaries and justify our existence.

I hear this sort of thing fairly often, and don't know who started it.
I've been programming computers for around 25 years, and have never been
"worshipped", nor would I have wanted that.  Also, my existence is most
emphatically not justified by being a slave to others.

Perhaps what many of the old-timers miss most is the expectation that
people who use computers would know what they are doing.  The idea that
an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given tool
without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than
it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws).
I hate to think how much time I've lost trying to help computer users
who could have been able to help themselves if they had spent even a
few hours of study before proceeding to mess around with the computer.