What if what you see is not what you get

I read a resume recently where the job applicant told of his 7 years of professional experience. It read as if he thought that was a long time. I have over four times that much experience and yet I still feel like a newby at times. Things are just changing that quickly. My friend Mr I (who is not as old as I am but he's close) recently talked about how far word processing had come. It is interesting (read the comments too) to see the perspective. if word processors have always been what you see is what you get you may want to take a look.

I remember when laser printers first came out and we had variable fonts in the same document for (pretty much) the first time. Proportional width fonts caused us no end of problems as we did not have WYSIWYG editors. Rather we used various markup languages like Runoff, TROFF, SDML and others.Those of us who used to do fancy "word processing" with text editors and markup languages had a rather easy time adjusting to HTML and the world wide web when it came around. So as much as things do change we build on what we've learned and used before. Knowledge is seldom if ever wasted. So if someone tells you that what you are teaching now will be useless because of change later you just tell them that what students learn now will at the very least help them understand what is coming as it comes along.