Re: Were you at AppleFest 1989 in San Francisco?

[macvaya@remove.this.mindspring.com (Cali Ruchala)]

In article <20021114224305.23934.00007771@mb-md.aol.com>, mjmahon@aol.com
(Michael J. Mahon) wrote:


> 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!


I'm afraid my beloved Macintosh was partially responsible (I
think we even mentioned this in a thread here a few weeks ago).
If you lived in a one-computer household (even that being a
luxury not too long ago), and that one computer was a Mac, you
had no exposure to any of this. I remember copying down a page
of code from a computer magazine in BASIC into my friend's
computer (this was years ago, and Yugoslavia, so I have no
idea what clone it was :-)) which displayed coloured lines 
and played La Cucaracha or something like that. I learned
more from the inevitable syntax errors and gotos on that
afternoon or two than I probably did in many hours of working
on a Macintosh - how things work, the progression from lines
of code, and, I should say, some appreciation for *how* a
computer understands a language. 

With that in mind, it took *years* of working in OS 8.x, 
and probably a few accidents, before I grasped what holding
down certain keys and moving icons around did. There's a bit
of natural curiosity that is missing. In the process of "bringing
the OS to the people," it somehow created an even greater
distance between the user and the actual functions of the computer.
How can you really get "hands-on" when you're working in a
metaphorical environment?

Though I had concurrent Unix experience, I still am too used
to switching to a GUI desktop when I need to "get something
done." So Apple II was something of culture shock. I suspect
it will be even more so for those born years after me, or 
who only experienced a post-Win9x or Mac environment as their
starting-point and a command-line as either something that
the tech-guy does or a last-ditch effort to save themselves
in a crisis of software or hardware failure.


> 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.  ;-)


Not to mention behavior which is happening without the user
doing anything - "internet services" being my primary example.
To be honest, this confirms some science fiction nightmares
I've had. I turn on a machine and I have no idea what it's
doing (not how it *functions* - you don't need to know how
a refrigerator works to eat - but literally what actions it's
taking without my initiative or participation).


> 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.


I echo you, interesting perspective...


> Maybe in another few years...


"We haven't yet completed our mission... Dave..." :-)

You know, I read an article about Steve Wozniak a few years
ago, in which he said words to the effect that the modern
computer user doesn't have much need for something that does more
than the Apple II could do. The statement on the face of it
seemed absurd, something from a guy living in the past. The 
more time goes on though, the more I see the wisdom in that, 
and the more I reconsider whether or not it was correct to 
take the fork in the road that got us where we are, despite 
the obvious advantages...


Cheers,


Cali