> While this is a fairly obvious troll line, I must > respectfully disagree. > Anyone who lived through (and with) the popularization of > computers among the masses must remember what it was like to > learn DOS and to be fumbling through a manual to learn the > cryptic command that one must type (without syntax errors) to > accomplish ANYTHING before the Macintosh. In contrast, upon > seeing the first Macintosh running in an Office supply store > without knowing anything at all about it, one could walk > up... grab the single button mouse (which I had never seen > before) and it was immediately OBVIOUS what one would do with it. > Click, select, drag. One could easily learn to use both > applications MacWrite and MacPaint without ever cracking a > book. It was a paradigm > changer: a computer which worked virtually as you thought it should.
My experience was different. I came from paper tape to teletype to mainframe green screens to DOS and then to Windows and I can still remember how difficult I found the mouse to control and how unintuitive it was to use the interface until someone had explained it to me. It was months before I realised how to copy a file by dragging and dropping, and during that time I always opened a DOS box when I needed to copy a file. I wasn't alone - I witnessed similar things in many people, experienced and naïve computer users alike, including young children bringing no background knowledge to it. Calling the WIMP interface intuitive was a masterpiece of marketing, but bears no relationship to reality. One of the Star Trek films captured it nicely when the crew came back in time to the 1980s and Scotty tried to use the mouse as a microphone to talk to the computer. Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
