Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 29, 2019

Moments when a legal pad and ballpoint pen would be more effective.

Technology tends to mess things up.

The words “drag” and “drop” come to mind in multiple contexts.

Second problem: If you want me to resign anyway, why would I want to comply with any of the other demands?

Look…..he got the students all working together to come up with their protest and list of demands. Mission Accomplished

Don’t forget this strip is a rerun from 1993.

It doesn’t make the students any more thoughtful…. but when you talk about computer literacy….

Pentiums were brand new, and very expensive, Windows 95 still two years away.

That disk was probably a 1.44 Mb (huge!) 3 1/2" floppy.

 

President King doesn’t seem that into computers, so he probably has, at best, a newish model 486 running Windows 3.1….

that’s IF it’s a stand-alone PC and not a workstation on some campus wide system that’s even more out of date.

Drag and drop was still pretty new to Windows 3.1, and worked in the file manager, but not in every program… and not at all if it’s older than that.

It did work a couple of years earlier on Apple computers but they were pretty primitive too.

 

I remember cos in 1993, I wanted a PC but had just lost my job…. so my nephew gave me an ancient IBM “compatible.”

In 1994, I bought a very used 386, with a great DOS shell, an earlier Windows that I only used part of the time, and a trackball instead of a mouse.

Three DAYS after my 1 year warranty expired.

It literally went up in smoke… burning up one side of my desk lamp.

 

In 1995, I considered myself lucky to find a used, older model 486 (the OS before Pentium) I could just about afford in a secondhand computer store… remember those?.

It had Windows 3.1 and a mouse…. and that’s when I learned to drag and drop….

 

That was two years after this strip ran.

I know some of you were way ahead of me… but I’m not so sure about President King.

The other way to go here the milenials in my office are fun to mess with. They are so hooked to the tech they forget the hardware. I sear I had a guy going nuts for 10 minutes trying to reboot his computer, when all I did was push the off button on his monitor.

Ah, those golden olden times when computers were 100% non-intuitive.

Minor technical corrections:

1. The 1.44 MB floppy had approximately two to four times the capacity of its predecessor, the 360 KB floppy;2. Pentiums and 486’s were central processors, not OS’s;3. In the strip President King does seem to be a bit of a laggard, but we must remember that an executive is expected to calm storms, and often slowing is an essential part of calming.

I commend Ms. Sunshine for avoiding all the ludicrous miss-usages of technical terms (e.g., “leads” for LED’s, or “Ay-Es-See -2” for ASCII) which were so very common among people who vainly attempted to appear technologically knowledgable. They gave us profound amusement, but that is not Ms. Sunshine’s purpose.

A computer is merely a tool and when a tool uses a tool the results can be hilarious. Unfortunately they can also be disasterous. Computers have advanced a great deal since I was trained by the Army in 1974 to repair the FADAC. I haven’t noticed that people have gotten any smarter.

See. This is how negotiations work. Modification without compromise but a simple realignment of the goal is allowed as long as it does not impact the over all sense of victory.

Demands developed by the Demand Committee.

The students should have known enough campus history to call on Megaphone Mark for help.

The 3 laws of human existence: 1.) Everything is more complex than it looks. 2.) Everything has unintended consequences. 3.) Then you die.