>I must admit that I've not heard anyone saying how things were better before computers. Or at least not lately. I'll give you an example of when it did happen though - I did an application some time ago (COBOL - Digital VAX, to just give a sense of time frame here) that was written for some government "budget analysts". These two guys worked with paper and pencil and while I was there writing the application.....I got those kinds of comments. I made friends with these two, knowing that they were the "heavy" users. When I indicated that the system was going to go live in late July, the panic that came about in meetings was nearly overwhelming. As you know, the govt starts it's fiscal year on Oct 1 and the fear was that the system would hose everything and they'd be having to work gadzillions of hours to correct everything. Of course, in Aug and Sept they always worked gadzillions of hours of OT because everyone was submitting their finalized budgets.....well to make a long story
>shorter...the system went up just fine, the analysts didn't have to put in ANY overtime for the new year.
>Now they couldn't live without their computers.
>
>I suspect that a higher percentage of those with Y2K problems are operating mainframes with apps built at a time of very expensive disk storage. It is the mgmt of these companies or institutions that has been responsible to accepting the task of Y2K and for those that haven't seen it coming or bothered to recognize it, oh well, they should get fired. For those that are just working at these places, no one should be pointing fingers at programmers and thinking that their jobs are cushy. When the Y2K #*$&% starts rolling down hill, though the current crop of programmers didn't create the mess, it'll be in their hands to fix.
>
>Steve

Working for the gov't myself, you just touch on some of the mindset of some of our users in general. In our DOS days, we had a menuing system that drove a bunch of batch files. I have seen users do everything possible to get at those same files because they don't want to use Win95. I even had at least one shell out to DOS and start the menu system to execute the batch files. Needless to say, he hosed his system.

I also am an independent developer on the side and support about 100 franchises for a particular company. These folks are spread out in all the southern border states (Southern Cal to Florida). When we set up their systems, they are appreciative but leery, resistant, sometime even hostile toward computerization. But after about 3 months, we would have to pry their computers out of their cold dead hands before they would give them up.

There are just some professions where you are never appreciated until something goes wrong. And even then, you are probably still being cursed under their breaths because the "darn thing ain't working."