Right on, Alex!
I used to teach science in HS 30 years ago. 22 years ago, for a part time job, I started selling these new fangled things called 'Apples'. I had to write usable Apple BASIC software for them to do something folks wanted to do so I could sell them. I was the first to buy one in Nebraska and the first teacher to use one in class. I started using one in class to do a wide variety of simulations and other education enhancements. I also kept my grades. I even wrote a program to score an invitational wrestling match, which was later modified and run at the State Wresting Meet later that year. When teachers and administrators saw my wrestling program, my gradebook program, my Datson Pickup racer simulation, the Neptune Navigator Simulation, and such other ed pgms like Lemonade or Hannibal their mouths watered and they envisioned all sorts of instructional advances witht the help of computers.
I quite teaching in 1980 and started my own consulting business. I also trained a lot of teachers how to program using BASIC. Then my business went into commerical areas and GUI RAD stuff and I lost track of education.
A few years ago I retired my business and decided to return to teaching. I subed in over 12 schools for about a year before I decided that teaching was a young person's game. I also noticed that many schools are still using Apple II's (or rather not using them). Computers are still too expensive, and so is the software. There are some good Physics programs out there, but most of the talent has gone into game software. Kids 'know' how to mouse around, but beyond that only the geeks take time to learn what is going on underneath. Computers in education is a squandered resource, being used by teachers to type tests and keep grades. Colony on Jupiter? It's been more than 25 years since we last landed on the Moon, and we haven't gone back. That says a lot.
JLK

>SET ANGRY ON
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>Gee, and I thought I was the only nut for whom "upgrade-fever" is akin, in most cases, to "generalized stupidity".
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>We're throwing billions of dollars into computers for what? To do word processing with cute "assistants" and be able to view the coolest screensavers.
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>During the past 5 years most office-related upgrades were geared towards "internet enabling" our simple apps. In the 99 pc-expo I literally drilled a couple of Microsoft people to give me a few NON internet related reasons to tell my clients to spend money upgrading to Office 97 or 2000.
>They gave me a lot of crap, but neither of them was able to suggest sound and logical reasons to do the upgrade.
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>It just angers me to see people using machines capable to set up a colony in jupiter to type memos and then have NASA screw up because they confused english and metric units. ARRGGHHHH!!!
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>SET ANGRY OFF
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>ahhhh... much better now... thanks!
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>alex
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>>VBRUN or CLR or what ever.... As long as it is transparent to VFP 6.0 running on Win95 or 98SE then we don't care.
>>Otherwise we will be staying with VFP6 and Win9X for quit a while. It's getting too expensive to do this upgrade stuff
>>all the time. We only finished about a year ago a 1.5+Million$ hardware plus licensing cost upgrade from Win3.11 to
>>Win95. Gong back so soon to the taxpayers to ask for another 2M$ to do it again would get us laughed out or fired.