Re: Were you at AppleFest 1989 in San Francisco?

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Cali Ruchala wrote:

>I wasn't really around when the Apple II was new, so I find
>myself grasping for simple details that most intense users
>probably learned fifteen years ago. Going from a later
>OS like Macintosh, OpenStep or Linux, backwards to the Apple II
>sometimes impairs my understanding of how the A2 works. If 
>the Apple or 68k communities weren't so friendly, I have 
>serious doubts I'd be quite as involved in either one.

This is an interesting perspective.

In the beginning of the computer age, computers were so
resource-constrained that it was unthinkable for them to try
to look like anything besides the simple mechanisms that
they were.  Command line interfaces and numbered menus
were the order of the day, and were obviously simple imperative
"commands" to do some relatively elementary action in a
fairly obvious way.

Now computers are fast enough and capacious enough that
the standard interfaces try to look like "desktops" with "objects"
having both attributes and "natural" behavior.  The complexity
of drag-and-drop with different flavors of objects can make the
head spin.  The varieties of defaults alone can fill a book or two!

The idea was to make computers more "natural" for relatively
untrained people to use, and the "nature" that is emulated on
modern machines is far from intuitive and never bug-free due
to all the partially overlapping complexities.

With an old machine, you can fully understand what it going
on.  That is, you can form a mental model of the machine and
the application that is, for all practical purposes, correct--so that
you can deduce how to get a desired result, and can infer the
result of an untried set of actions.

With today's computers, one is frequently surprised at the
result of trying a new behavior, sometimes negatively.  ;-)

In the quest to make the machine behavior adapt to the user
rather than the user to the (simple) machine, we have taken
responsibility from the user to adapt, who is good at it, and
given it to the machine's operating environment, which is still
not so good at it.

Maybe in another few years...

-michael

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