Friday, August 12, 2005
(12:46 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Windows 3.1 Nostalgia
One area where the Windows 3.x File Manager program was superior to the current Windows Explorer -- aside from the obvious matter of the name -- was that there was an icon in each folder referring to its parent folder. (Back then "folders" were called "directories," but I'm translating it into modern terms for the kids.) Just now I wanted to move a file to the parent folder, and I had to cut the file, push the "up" button, and paste it. Simply dragging it onto the ".." or "Parent" icon would have been easier.Let me also say that the Windows file system is ridiculous. There is no excuse for keeping the convention of letters for disk drives, still less for continuing to use "C:" as the designation for the primary hard drive. I also hate how they obfuscate matters by making the "Desktop" folder -- which is an actual folder deep in the bowels of the "C: drive" -- into the fake parent of "My Computer." Worst of all: if you push the "up" button in the "My Documents" folder, you get the desktop instead of C:. In past versions of Windows, before they had worked out the multi-user thing to the degree they have now, there was a literal "C:\My Documents" folder accessible through "My Computer," and there was a pseudo-"My Documents" folder for each user, which you could get to by using desktop shortcuts. There was always the possibility that a user who had simply pressed "cancel" on the user login would save a file under the universal "My Documents," then be unable to find it later. Kind of like the old "Windows on top of DOS" system, the multi-user system was simply slapped on top of the single-user system, in a really poorly-thought-out way.
I'm sure that "Longhorn" or whatever will finally put all my Windows complaints to rest. Either that, or they'll make it so that the "paperclip guy" is constantly looking over your shoulder and reporting suspicious activity to the FBI, and you have to call the company to get the code to turn it off. Or maybe -- maybe -- they'll overload it with useless new "features" that no one wants or needs, but in order to show it off, they'll ship it with absolutely everything turned on so that the computer-illiterate audience to whom they are ostensibly "sensitive" will be subjected to intrusive pop-ups and needlessly slow performance.
My laptop is now eight months old -- is that long enough for Linux to support all my hardware? Or do I need to wait another year and a half?
