Comments by "Jeffrey Phipps" (@jeffreyphipps1507) on "Veronica Explains" channel.

  1. knowing where to look for answers is more important than trying to remember everything.
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  2. Yeah, who needs that troublesome GUI. When I was young I was happy with Edit on TSO and the SEU on the AS/400. When I came over to Linux, it had that wonderful Vi editor and on MS-DOS they had that tolerable Turbo Pascal IDE based on WordStar. It was good enough for me! Then these people decided everything had to be mouse enabled. Then GUI enabled. <sigh> I miss the old days.
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  3. Then there was the manual for the NES BASIC (Taylor/Amy)...
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  4. I taught Linux basics at university in the 90s and rudimentary Awk was part of that. I definitely think a video is something I want to see on your channel.
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  5. I think that not all things are as "intuitive" as people in IT assume. Also, older people from IT have a knack for feeling at home with the non-intuitive versus the so-called "intuitive" things of today. GUIs of today seem less intuitive than things like Veronica may remember (ever use ISPF fast tracking?). I find myself using more keyboard shortcuts than mousing into oblivion (partially due to medical reasons - tremors - that make typing easier than using the mouse).
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  6. Want to help every new programming student? Do videos on how structured programming works. Maybe how to design good UI work. How to debug the old fashioned way. Lastly, teach them IPO - Input Process Output. Students aren’t getting introduction to programming anymore because schools want them to graduate sooner.
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  7. Ooh! Cover Nevada COBOL!
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  8. Veronica, you don't think Man Pages measure up??? LOL!
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  9. grubby bugs...
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  10. I own both an F (which I started with in school) and an M (which came later). The thing I remember most about the F is how heavy it is. I always said that if someone broke into the house that I could grab the keyboard and kill the intruder with it. Yes, it's that heavy. The M was a little lighter - (you'd only put an intruder in the hospital with it - maybe six weeks in traction). I use the keyboards on the respective machines that I now own. On my modern machines I use mechanical keyboards because of medical reasons - I can tell on a tactile key type if I have pressed the key far enough to make it register or if I have accidentally pressed it twice. I have tremors, and this type of keyboard helps. I can also pull the key caps AND the keys to clean it thoroughly. I'm not a keyboard snob per se. I like what works for me. Use what you want. Other than the F, M, and my mechanical keyboard, I have two identical keyboards from MS that for some reason the layout fits my hands perfectly. The key quality is tolerable. I use one on a 486 computer and one (through an adapter) on a Tandy 1000 which I bought before heading off to college after HS. The Tandy keyboard was adequate at best at the time, but the MS keyboard works great with the adapter. I could use a mechanical keyboard, but the MS keyboards were already in my possession. I can't begin to tell how many crappy keyboards I've thrown away and that I still have because they'd work in an emergency. Mostly. I have three "solar" keyboards that take FOREVER to charge. I have two USB wireless keyboards that aren't bad, but with my tremors I really need the keyboard to be mechanical. I did get different color key caps to help separate function keys, Windows, and context key. Makes them easy to spot. It's what works for me. It's funny that the layouts on the C64 I had and the Plus/4 seemed "normal" at the time. Now going back to those two seems really hard. I imagine that's true for users on other retro machines.
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  11. My issue as an instructor is that students come into my programming courses not knowing how computers work and struggle learning how to program. Their attention spans are short. I need to make videos that teach them how things work, while keeping them short enough to keep their attention. I didn't have this problem 30 years ago.
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  12. "Ruining your downloads folder since 1995" - 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Not even the first funny thing and and only 54 seconds in.
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  13. Finally, a reasonable opinion. Mechanics don't have one tool in their toolboxes, why should computer people be expected to do so? Because of my development jobs, I use multiple versions of Windows, multiple distros of Linux, and Mac OS off a Citrix server. I use 11 different programming languages (which has dragged me through many languages through the years). My computer hobbies make me use more languages, hardware, and emulators). Well spoken!
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  14. You mean like the Commodore 1541 users manual? Hmm...
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  15. I both miss and don't miss tractor fed dot matrix printers. The wide, green bar paper was handy for program printouts compared to laser printers of today, but I prefer lasers to green bar/tractor fed dot matrix for other things. It just depends on the job.
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  16. Oddly, I've never used any thing for this except ls - for decades. I didn't know there was anything else.
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  17. Eons ago, when I taught in classroom, I was in a room teaching about MS-DOS. At the back of the room, was 30 seats with IBM Selectric typewriters used for a typing class sometimes scheduled in the room. I was assuming that most of the people in my class knew what a typewriter was and how it basically worked, even if they weren't marginally proficient at using it. At the break, I let students come to me and ask questions that they didn't feel comfortable asking publicly. I had a student come to me during break who asked a simple question - "What's a typewriter?". I noticed he had an accent. I asked where he was from and he said, "Siberia" (this was just after the fall of the USSR). So I showed him one of the Selectric machines at the back. Unfortunately, he didn't get it. He left the course. However, I learned that not everybody knew about all comparative technologies. I would stumble over this only one more time - a student didn't know what the triangle for "play" meant in a media component on a programming project. I believe he was from Haiti (around the time of the earthquake we got more students from the islands). You try very hard as a teacher to find common ground to build knowledge on with students, however there are times when you are surprised to find people with no foundation.
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