On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
or it was too slow on the PCs most folks had back then.
The 'too slow' complaints were most often from people who tried to start
WDSC, edit one member, compile one member and then close it down. Once
the IDE was running, typing was just as fast as SEU, and the ability to
cut and paste normally made editing simpler and faster than MM...MM A.
I have never used RDi or any of its predecessors. However, I have
used Eclipse from the era of WDSC. And I can tell you that Eclipse
was absolutely, dreadfully slow on my PC at work. I specifically
avoided closing it if at all possible because it would take forever to
load. Even when it was "warmed up" it was nowhere near as fast as
SEU.
Now, I'll grant that my PC at the time was probably on the wimpy side,
but not so far behind the curve to be a misrepresentation of many IT
shops out there. So I personally find all the complaints of WDSC
performance extremely plausible.
(2) It was definitely not promoted well enough.
I don't know what that means. Seriously.
To be honest, I'm not sure myself. The midrange community is so small
and insular compared to the mainstream computing communities that
disseminating information to its members is definitely a challenge.
The stack of tapes, then CDs, then DVD that IBM sent to us
have always been cryptically labelled, and yet we managed
to install it all one way or another.
Um, no, not all of us have. Some of us are pure programmers, who
practically never do any installation or system configuration work.
All except WDSC. Why? I don't think it's a marketing problem
as much as a consumer demand problem. We like SEU, we
really like it!
No, we don't. Well, OK, some of us (not me) really do like SEU, and a
lot of us (including me) have gotten to the point where it's pretty
deeply embedded in our muscles, like a kind of weird, IBM-flavored vi.
But as a programmer, I simply didn't know WDSC existed until I started
digging around on my own. My employers didn't know about it. My
colleagues didn't know about it. Before Google, there's almost no
chance I would have found out about it at all.
My take on why not WDSC? Because it has never been a "necessary"
component, in the way that the RPG compiler is a necessary component.
And it doesn't *live* on the i. In that way, it's more like Client
Access, except not as necessary as Client Access. And some shops even
make do without Client Access for their 5250 interface.
It seems a chicken and egg situation to me.
I can definitely agree with that.
Speaking of [alternatives], 'Have you tried the modern alternative
to SEU? Press F1 for more details.' :-)
Yes, I've seen that message, but only long after I'd already found out
about RDi (like, years after). As someone else pointed out, even if
you press F1, you don't really get very helpful details. And on our
latest machine, I never got that message.
John Y.
midrange.com
