arhar
I had the same thing. I also used it to teach myself BASIC... Just because there was no other way to communicate with the computer, really.
My "favorite" part was how long it would take to load a program from the cassette drive. At least 5-6 minutes, during which the screen would go weird colors (with time, you learned to distinguish - white/red means nothing happening, blue/yellow means program is loading) and make really weird sounds...
Although I agree with the author, for the most part, there's a flip side as well. There exists GOOD enterprise software. Difference between good enterprise software and open source software is enterprise software HAS to work. For open source software, it's "cool if it works."
Of course, I'm horribly overgeneralizing open source software (kind of the like the author does with enterprise software), but hear me out. A valid analogy would be enterprise software is an adult, as it does things out of necessity, and doesn't care about looks, code elegancy, fancy algorithms, etc... And open source software is the cool kid on the block, who doesn't really need to do anything, but does it for the coolness factor.
Sometimes with pretty bad results. For example - back in 2004, we here at large Dilbertian financial company that I'm working nights to escape have tried using Groovy. It worked pretty well, and we were happy.. until we went to production. It was then we discovered that Groovy had a memory leak, and our mission-critical application hung every day during crunch time.
Moral of the story? This kind of thing is NOT tolerated among enterprise software (at least where I work)... and that memory leak in Groovy hasn't been fixed in a couple of years, and I don't know if it has been fixed at all, actually... I haven't checked Groovy in a while.
This silly thing couldn't even calculate this, something that Google calc does perfectly:
http://www.google.com/search?q=the+answer+to+life%2C+the+uni...