Now I don't know if you refer to my bad english (ok, is consequences better?) or to the fact that the "expectations" inflated beyond any reasonable and even unreasonable size got not "fulfilled"?

Let me tell one true story (weekend is approaching anyway).

I bought a PC back in 1994 for my father's "business" (he run - actually still runs, even if he is 70 - a small textile workshop in an old house, he has one (1) employee, but we call that house "the factory" :-) and he has a "factory yard", "factory garage", even a "factory garden"!) and my mother was using it to run his bookkeeping (my father is really smart but he never got beyond "ENTER and ESCAPE" as far as computers are concerned). We bought a bookkeeping program back then and my mother was permanently finding errors in it, so that each three or four months I went to the software company and made the programmer crazy by making comments like "my mother made this and that (an unbelievably complex combination of operations) and your program crashed in this and that way (a very precise description of the symptoms and consequences from which the programmer was usually able to correct the error within 5 minutes while I was still there). Not to say, that the list was always very long and I made him busy for the rest of the day - but he admitted we reported him more errors than all other customers together (and it WAS a rather successful product, the company still sells its descendant). We bought a couple of upgrades, but my mother decided that the upgrades were not worth the money so the last one was dated around 1997 or '98 or so.

When 1.1.2000 came, two things happened.

Ye olde computer simply set the date back to 1900. OK, that was easy for her, she simply run "date" and set it back... well, if I recall correctly, she set something like "2100" to get "2000" or something similar...

The other thing failing was the software itself. Now I don't know how did she solve that, but the fact is that she succeeded.

Now my mother is PC-competent enough to hack around these limitations and she STILL uses that machine with the same software today (and DOS of the appropriate vintage, of course). I am afraid to spoil her and give them anything as slow, unreliable and flaky as a state-of-the-art PC with some modern version of Windows notabene Linux...

Jan Waclawek