You're not.

In the early 1980's, before the first Chicago Expo (1985) and well before the internet and the IPDB, I was playing around with my first computer. Check this out: dual 5 1/4 floppy PC clone (AT&T brand), no hard drive, green mono-chrome screen, 256k RAM, mouseless, Function keys on the left end of keyboard (remember that?). It seems not long afterwards that retrofitting with hard drives was all the rage, the choices were 20MB or 40MB. Everybody was going for the sexy 40MB but I went for 20MB figuring I'd never use up even that much. I never bought a printer because I figure by the time I learned enough to need to print anything, printers will have improved away from the screechy dot matrix ones we had. (I was correct on that idea, btw. Can't say if that explains how quickly technology moves forward or is an indictment of how slow-pokey I can be.)

So, I bought a database software product called dBase III made by Ashton Tate. It had been out for a short while, the community colleges gave classes on it, they seemed to like it, I got used to it, so I bought it and decided I would program on my new computer a database to inventory every pinball machine ever made. I had meager exposure to programming, like BASIC and two community college semesters in COBOL. Using dBase III, I wrote interactive programs to make individual game listings where I would inventory in more searchable detail than even the IPDB does today, for instance in my search screen you could ask for all the games that have max scores of 1,999 points or all the games that are wedge heads, stuff like that. I transcribed the full contents of the 1979 Pinball Collector Guide into the database. Home computers did not do graphics then but at least I would inventory where in my pinball books the pictures could be found. It was a pretty cool database.

Ok, enough of that. I gotta get to the point here.

In 1988, Ashton-Tate came out with dBase IV. Companies bought it and so did I. That product was a disaster. It had so many bugs and flaws in it and Ashton-Tate was not exactly responsive. I read just now in google that it took them two years to issue corrections (that fits what I remember) and by then companies had abandoned their product for competitors' database software. I was so turned off (and my database project has reached its max anyway) that I gave up playing with computers until 2001 when I bought my next one, and then IPDB came along.

Here's what got my goat. Ashton-Tate solicited their customers (me, too) for feedback on what all the errors were so that they could fix them. Of course, what else perhaps can they do at that point. But that's when I had the Big Epiphany over this. I decided that Ashton-Tate KNEW they had issued a broken product. It was too broken to have escaped the notice of their QC. In my youthful idealism (in today's context, it would be "naivete"), to think that a distinguished company would sell something of poor quality was just... beyond the pale! How dare they charge me full price and then want me to be an unpaid consultant/employee to help them make their product better for future customers? Outrageous! They used my money to finish production! The nerve! I was boiling mad.

Ever since then, I am not the guy you will see on TV who camps out overnight to get one of the first new iPhones. I am not that guy. My faith has been ruined. If there's software in it, I will let other people be the unwitting beta-testers for anything new that comes along and I'll wait until the bugs get worked out before I'll consider a purchase, thank you very much. Even the Luddites has sense to smash the imperfect machines.

So, I stumbled on this thread for a "Finish the Code" Movement and if course it caught my eye! I have my boxing gloves on ready to dip and weave! LOL. No way I'd buy a new pinball machine that couldn't stand with integrity right out of the box. So, if that is what is happening nowadays, if that is the New Wave, I've already had my wake-up call.