Posted on 12/18/2006 10:09:46 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Peter Coffee, an editor of eWeek magazine has published a list of 25 killer apps of all time. This list totally reflects his personal timeline in the computer publishing business and sets a benchmark for ‘killer apps’ although I’m a fan of his work. I’ve been in technology since 197x…’ Big deal. I wrote code on a DEC PDP-11 using a Hazeltine terminal at Univ of Miami back in 1979. The technology sucked big time.
Mitch Kapor made boucoup $$ from Lotus 1-2-3. Many of us cut our teeth on 1-2-3’s macros. The Lotus Magazine from the 1980’s was a GOLDMINE of information for spreadsheet nerds. My 1-2-3 macros were sometimes pages long and could repaint the bathroom and regrout the kitchen counter. Then came Excel with VBA and oh-my-God it was the equivalent of programming nirvana. 1-2-3 was reserved for the back shelf at Goodwill. And of course we didn’t have to shoe-horn it into dBaseIII+ > we just linked or cut-n-pasted it into MS-Access and instant database relativity. Woo hoo!!
So what is the real ‘killer app’ list? I could list my own. Peter has DEFINITELY set off an interesting discussion with this article. Sad part is, many folk don’t have tools in their toolbox and wouldn’t know how to maniuplate data (or want to, for that matter). But if you’re a ‘data guy’ (or gal) what does work for you? Does it work for your corporation? Many of us have jobs because we know how to manipulate data when others don’t. Makes for a strange ‘niche’ in life.
I use grep constantly too. I deal with a lot of output files from an engineering structural analysis. There are many post processing tools to filter out specific pieces of information. But if I need to know something unique about the results I grep it out.
I left sed in there even though I've started using perl command line more often.
Anything that I've been doing with let's say:
sed "s/regex/stuff/" fileI can do with
perl -p -e "s/regex/stuff/" fileand I even have the option of in-place editing with -i
But the biggest reason is that my "time" tests of perl line processing beats sed for large files.
"EDLIN"
I remember using EDLIN back in '83.
If you like the linux-y stuff, but circumstances dictatate Windows, you might want to have a look at Powershell.
$a %| -match "regex" | out-file
Excellent Celestia Addons: Celestia Motherload.
Yeah, I know. They were talking about other kinds of software, but Celestia is da bomb.
I'm trying to forget.
A good terminal and shell is all I need to start doing much of my work on my PC. I already have perl, a good intel fortran compiler, and Matlab.
It's been RTM for about a month. As long as you've got XP SP2 and .net 2.0 you should be good to go.
Nope, not even Win95 or Win98 or WinME were independent operating systems. They were all still just GUI applications over DOS. You could delete any of those Windows directories from the DOS command line (not from a DOS box within the GUI, of course).
In 95/98/ME, when DOS booted, it ran through AUTOEXEC.BAT, and you could set a line in MSDOS.SYS that would prohibit the automatic transfer to Windows at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT. It would boot to DOS, and stop at the command line. You could type "WIN" and it would launch Windows. With WinME they made that harder to do, but WinME was still running on DOS.
With the advent of NT -- NT 3.1, 4, 5 (2000), 5.1 (XP), and 6 (Vista) -- Windows was the OS.
Yes, "Vista" is in fact merely "NT6". That designator is all over the Vista codebase -- the old 13-year old NT codebase. With some window-dressing, yes; but it's still NT.
OK, I'm older! I programmed IBM 1401's using Autocoder back in 1966, and learned BASIC on a teletype machine connected to Dartmouth (Kiewit).
It's better than Excel, with matlab at least, when you buy the application, you own it. Also, Mathworks sells matlab to ANSII C "compilers". I've written functions in matlab in a day that would take weeks (or more) to code and unit test in C.
Numbers don't lie. The last time I checked, more copies of Flight Simulator had been sold than any other application (other than operating systems), ever.
HF
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