May 26, 2011, 8:00 AM — Today's computers offer processing power, speed, storage, Internet connectivity, display size and quality, and other capabilities that few even dreamed of ten or more years ago, certainly not at prices affordable for any developer or even consumer.
And many of the applications that run on these machines cheerfully consume these cycles, network megabits per second and gigabytes of RAM and storage.
But there are some things they don't do that the old, slow, often command-line-intead-of-GUI-oriented applications did.
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I've got my own pet peeves, of course. Two of the text editors I used to use -- PC-Write, the old DOS text processor I used to write my freelance articles with, and also PEN, a Unix screen-oriented text editor that was at BBN when I worked there, which I used for writing computer documentation and other projects -- could split the screen window as many times as I wanted (e.g., I could have five or six slices of a file showing). For editing long, complex documents, this was a great convenience. By contrast, Microsoft Word can only split the screen in two.
And when I moved my landline phone from Verizon to Comcast (going digital in the process), I lost one feature that was often useful: Remote forwarding. With remote forwarding I could set call forwarding from a phone other than my home phone to a phone other than my home phone.
Here are some thoughts from developers and users who have been in the biz long enough to have used a variety of tools. Not surprisingly, the features they miss mostly center around productivity and efficiency.
Shortcuts and keyboards
"I have been typing on a computer since 1981," says Eric Loyd, President and CTO of Bitnetix Incorporated, a small technology consulting company located near Rochester, New York. "What I miss most are keyboards that have some 'omph' to them, and software that makes use of keyboard shortcuts. I really miss the 'clicky' IBM Model M keyboards from the mid and late '80s, for instance. I can type 150+ words per minute and I can move my fingers across a keyboard faster than I can move my hand to a mouse, move the cursor, click, and put my fingers back on the keyboard. I really really really miss customizable keyboard shortcuts."
John Hedtke, a consultant, author of 27 non-fiction books, and president of JVH Communications, says "The main feature I miss on today's keyboards is having FUNCTION keys (F1, F2, etc) on the left of the main key area, and a CONTROL key in the middle of the left-side column of keys (so it goes from top to bottom: ~/TAB/CTRL/SHIFT/ALT). There are a number of CTRL+F-key and ALT+F-key combinations that can quickly and easily done with one hand in this configuration without looking, whereas having the CTRL key at the bottom and the function keys at the very top requires you to use two hands to create a combination and you have to look at the keyboard. If you're a touchtyper like me, you loathe anything makes you stop looking at the screen and moving into a real-time mode. The flow is broken and it's slow."
Fortunately, reports Hedtke, "There is a programmable keyboard available -- the CVT Avant Stellar, which has the F-keys to the left AND the top. It also lets you reprogram the locations of the CTRL, ALT, and CAPS LOCK keys. (They ship their keyboards with keycaps for those keys, in fact. They know their audience.) The keyboards have that deep stroke and click that the old IBM AT keyboards had. The tactile and auditory feedback adds 20wpm to my typing speed when I'm really cruising."
This keyboard isn't cheap, Hedtke concedes: "They were nearly $200 when CVT was making them directly, and the current Avant Stellar keyboard is around $325. But for many of us, it's more than worth it."
(If you've got one of these keyboards, you may want to have it reconditioned at some point, notes Hedtke.)
