After 10 years at Sea I decided on a career switch and in 1979 is started work as an Electronic Engineer, I worked for a number of companies like Ferranti, Olivetti, Norsk Data, Motorola, Phillips, DEC and a number of others over the 40 intervening years.

Floppy drives were 8 inches in diameter, memory was made of ferrite and came in wooden boxes and a steel carrier - it weighed about 2 pounds per Kb. You could fix things, for some of the equipment I worked on you had to write your own diagnostics to do this - but you could fix things. Now systems are not repairable, all these things are just throwaway - and sad to say attitudes have followed. We went through the discrete components, to integrated circuits in Ceramic and Plastic encapsulations, then we went through the low power versions of it all. Now we have integrated circuits that have densities that were undreamt of just fifteen years ago.

But essentially all that has happened is that the skill set has been replaced by a courier, who will take a replacement unit to site and plug it in - possibly transferring a hard drive from one chassis to the other.

As to the commercialisation of the experience - in my opinion one of the worst decisions ever made, there was an earlier reference to "Altavista" - it was brilliant but it did cost a significant amount to run. Forgetting to renew the domain was also a problem in this particular case.

I watch the vendors (usually sales or value added resellers) repeatedly mislead customers, I could give you numerous quotes of things I have heard over the years - lead people into a place that they don't want to be. This isn't done maliciously, it's normally through ignorance - the job of a sales person is to sell and few of them undestand the technology.

It's usually left to some techie to make things work, even things that weren't meant to work together. Which is where the good old Google search really comes into it's own, a generic search for an item of equipment will bring you a couple of pages on how to buy one - followed by in most cases nothing of any use!

Arrrrrrgh!!!!!! Many thumps on the keyboard!