Ha! Yes I could tell you about punched cards. I could also tell you about punched paper tape and wiring control boards for unit record equipment. But there's no need, you can see all that stuff for yourself in any good technology museum.

I agree that many people won't want to mess around with command line programs. I actually use a UNIX shell for everything because the Microsoft command shell is just to primative to be useful. I use the Bourne again shell (bash) from Cygwin, a more advanced version of the Bourne shell.

The key thing for the purposes of folk music and The Mudcat Café, is that any program one chooses should import and export open standard music interchange formats like ABC, CMN, MusicXML, LilyPond, etc. The MIDI format, by itself, is insufficient to represent printed music. Many software products only deal with their own proprietary format plus MIDI. These should be avoided if there is any expectation of sharing music with other people.

      - Mark