Unpredictable Behavior I know that I will receive e-mail from thoughtful Windows gurus who wish to help solve my GPF problem. That's not the point. The point is, this copy of Word 6.0, a fine program, was installed by the fine folks at Micron Computers in my very fine indeed Pentium system when I purchased it this past summer -- and it has never worked properly.
The people at Microsoft's testing labs doubtless spend millions of man-hours trying to make sure these GPFs don't occur. And when they happen anyway, we're supposed to drop everything, track them down and eliminate them.
In the days when simple DOS applications resided in simple little directories and kept to themselves, troubleshooting may have been a technically obscure undertaking, but it was containable. In Windows, too often, to fix a simple problem you must sacrifice a day.
And so, though I have plenty of Windows experience, I have decided to coexist peacefully with Word's glitch.
Neither of these behaviors -- my program's GPF and my own unwillingness to fix it -- was predictable. Programs and people rarely behave as engineers expect. That's a good reason to question every single prediction in "The Road Ahead."
