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He touches on a number of things that bother me about technology today. The biggest is the " New is good and Old is bad" idea that seems to be in the subconcious of every person in the tech industry. Things are discarded because they are old instead of because they don't serve a purpose. New things are added because they are New, not because they serve a valid purpose.
I am in a position that I evaluate the IT skills of computer techs. I have found that a good knowledge of DOS is a flag that marks a better quality technician. They understand that the GUI is just a pretty picture and that something else is going on under the hood. They new techs have never seen an "Old" command prompt and they believe everything they see in a window.
I feel that a big problem is that computers aren't really processing machines anymore. You have to babysit them now. I used to run a CAD service starting in the DOS days and ending up in the Win 95 era. In DOS it was a simple task to throw hundreds of CAD drawings into a directory, do 30 seconds of setup, and then type a batch file name and then walk away while the equipment did all the work. It was easy to string lots of automated tasks together. Now computers require you to sit in front of them and click on everything. You can't walk away and have it do the work. The only way past this deficiency is to have a programming project for every different task.
( We still automate processes using DOS batch files in XP because IT WORKS!)
BTW - I read the whole article before realizing who the author was. Only thing I would like him to add is another Uplift novel!
