William Chops Westfield wrote:

> Originally, there was BATCH.

> It used to be that I could have a computer go through all my files and
> (for example) convert parallax mnemonics to microchip mnemonics for
> me, and I didn't have to be there.

  It seems to me that what you refer to is actually "programming".  The
concept espoused by M$ is that you don«t need to do this anymore,
because no-one does anything on a computer apart from write letters
(e-mail?), browse the internet, and maybe tot up their accounts.  All
this is performed by pro-forma programs as purchased.

  What *you* do, and a lot of what I do, is *by far* a minority vocation
nowadays and being a minority function, is simply not provided for where
bulk and profit margins are the driving factors.

  Yes, I noticed this last evening when I needed to reload my website
which mysteriously vanished Wednesday (not a personal matter, a "few"
others apparently vanished also).

  I haven«t yet tried any of thse Windoze-based FTP programs that can
"point and click" transfer a whole directory in one go, performing case
conversion and extension expansion (.htm to .html) on the fly, so I did
a "dir" of the directory, used my macro editor (EDWIN) to convert cases
and transform this listing into a stream of "put" commands, then used
WORDPAD to enter this file into the Clipboard and finally "pasted" it
into the DOS FTP session.

  I had some trouble doing this, but finally woke up to the fact that
(as has been mentioned before on this list), in a DOS window, programs
become event-driven and "paste" does not generate events.  In order to
drive "paste" therefore, you need either keyboard events, interrupt
events (timeouts?) such as net socket activity or in fact *mouse*
events, so to get it to work, you have to continuously sweep the mouse
over the DOS window!  (FTP has no mouse interface).

  It«s nice to know you can still patch things, at least using DOS!

  Cheers,
        Paul B.