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The modern version of this is something with a big dumb GUI that is trivial to train on. A CLI or text only approach is going to take longer to learn and be com

The modern version of this is something with a big dumb GUI that is trivial to train on. A CLI or text only approach is going to take longer to learn and be comfortable with. I get TCP/IP with modern stuff which allows me monitoring, remote access, remote upgrades, etc. We also get standardization. Windows/Linux and USB aren't going anywhere anytime soon and even if they do we can emulate x86 systems in a hypervisor. If your ancient non-x86 system dies you either get lucky on ebay or you don't. I also can't casually send the customer a text telling them their car is ready or have my supervisor look at my metrics on what I'm doing with the machine. Or a million other things on these old systems. Or you can, sorta, by shoehorning in garbage like analog modems and swapping out floppies all the time, but who wants to do that? I think young people tend to fetishize old tech because they weren't there when it was used. Floppy failures were common, IRQ issues, programs taking down the entire OS, no real security, and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless. Now its been vastly democratized and has higher levels of ease of use. That comes at the cost of complexity.

mrob 10y ago
>A CLI or text only approach is going to take longer to learn and be comfortable with I disagree. I once worked on a telephone switchboard, using a old text based interface and a specially designed keyboard with dedicated buttons for all the functions. It took a few minutes to learn what the buttons did. Everything was fast and responsive, and there were no distractions on screen. I later worked there again after they had "upgraded" to a modern Windows based system. This was far more difficult and slower to use and it did nothing the old system couldn't. Training somebody to push a dedicated button is easier than training somebody to use a GUI. Look at the interfaces people use at fast food restaurants. There's a huge array of dedicated buttons, and it takes very little skill to operate. The only advantage of GUIs over dedicated hardware UIs is lower cost.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Well, the real advantage is the button can change or you can add more buttons trivially. Compare the on-screen dialer and keyboard of the iPhone to the old school 9-digit keypad. The former is superior for most use cases. Also you can abstract away your GUI interface with a hardware button if preferred. I'm using a hardware keyboard to type this for example, even though this computer has a touch screen. I have this flexibility and customization options that the old school approach didn't really have.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Do haptic feedback mean nothing these days? I can't type shit on any OSK without looking at the keys, or being supported by some spellchecker. But i can type this without looking down because i know when i hit a key etc.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Let me put it like this: productivity ^ | old, complicated /- | tools /--- | /--- | /-- | /--- | /--- | /--- | /-- | /--- | /--- /------------------------- +----------/-------------- modern, pretty | /--- "tools" | /--- |-- ----------------------------------------------------> experience The modern trend of dumbing down interfaces (which is primarily happening in the markets where you sell apps by how pretty they are, not how useful) indeed makes it easier to learn them - at the cost of making the application less functional, and less useful overall. > and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless You say as if this was a bug. It's a feature. This is the fact for any kind of complex, powerful tool - whether it's a combine harvester or furnace or industrial laser cutter - takes traning to use to its full power. Making software easy to use fully from the get-go only means making it not do much.
- etjossem 10y ago
  > Making software easy to use fully from the get-go only means making it not do much. False dichotomy. It is absolutely possible to write modern mass-market software and also offer complex functionality that wouldn't be needed by the average user. It is good practice from a UX perspective to avoid surfacing advanced features unless the user is actively looking for them (in your example, that's the experienced user). I like the graph, though.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  > Making software easy to use fully from the get-go only means making it not do much. Back before people started spreading wrong ideas like this, we had things like HyperCard, which were both easy-to-learn and extremely powerful. Now we don't, because people like you seem to think the entire concept is impossible. It's not. It never was.
Grishnakh 10y ago
>I think young people tend to fetishize old tech because they weren't there when it was used. Floppy failures were common, IRQ issues, programs taking down the entire OS, no real security, and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless. You sound young to me. Back in the 80s, computers were quite reliable, they just couldn't do that much. Floppies were extremely reliable; they had to be because the computers back then ran entirely on floppies. Only really expensive computers had hard drives until the very late 80s. It wasn't until the mid/late 90s that floppy drives became unreliable, because everyone stopped using them for anything except Windows drivers and the manufacturing of them (both drives and disks) went to low-cost areas and the quality went down the tubes. IRQ issues were a problem with DOS and Windows machines with ISA cards; before that on things like C=64s, there was no such thing. Security wasn't a problem back then, because no one was connected to a network; the best they had was telephone modems to connect to Compu$erve or BBSes. Viruses started becoming a real problem when everyone moved to DOS and downloaded stuff from BBSes. Back in the Apple ][ and C=64 days, security was unnecessary. Even over on the Internet-connected UNIX side (something mainly only used by college people, not by people with C=64s), security didn't become a big issue until Morris's worm in 1988. As for CLI taking longer to learn, perhaps, but I remember office secretaries using DOS just fine, unlike these days where everyone has no clue what to do with a command line and is terrified of it. They might not have done really advanced stuff, but learning a few DOS commands like COPY and MOVE and DEL really isn't that hard for someone with half a brain. As for "standardization", I don't know where you get that idea. Tons of people are having all kinds of problems with their Windows software not working on Windows 10, older peripherals not working on Win10, etc. How long did it finally take us to have some standardization on the web, after dealing with IE6 for so long? We didn't have these problems back in the text-only days. And again, over on the UNIX side, they had much better attempts at standardization with the X protocol, which allowed remote GUI access between completely different UNIX OSes, in the 80s. It took ages for anything similar to arrive on Windows machines.

mrob 10y ago

>A CLI or text only approach is going to take longer to learn and be comfortable with I disagree. I once worked on a telephone switchboard, using a old text based interface and a specially designed keyboard with dedicated buttons for all the functions. It took a few minutes to learn what the buttons did. Everything was fast and responsive, and there were no distractions on screen. I later worked there again after they had "upgraded" to a modern Windows based system. This was far more difficult and slower to use and it did nothing the old system couldn't. Training somebody to push a dedicated button is easier than training somebody to use a GUI. Look at the interfaces people use at fast food restaurants. There's a huge array of dedicated buttons, and it takes very little skill to operate. The only advantage of GUIs over dedicated hardware UIs is lower cost.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Well, the real advantage is the button can change or you can add more buttons trivially. Compare the on-screen dialer and keyboard of the iPhone to the old school 9-digit keypad. The former is superior for most use cases. Also you can abstract away your GUI interface with a hardware button if preferred. I'm using a hardware keyboard to type this for example, even though this computer has a touch screen. I have this flexibility and customization options that the old school approach didn't really have.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Do haptic feedback mean nothing these days? I can't type shit on any OSK without looking at the keys, or being supported by some spellchecker. But i can type this without looking down because i know when i hit a key etc.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Let me put it like this: productivity ^ | old, complicated /- | tools /--- | /--- | /-- | /--- | /--- | /--- | /-- | /--- | /--- /------------------------- +----------/-------------- modern, pretty | /--- "tools" | /--- |-- ----------------------------------------------------> experience The modern trend of dumbing down interfaces (which is primarily happening in the markets where you sell apps by how pretty they are, not how useful) indeed makes it easier to learn them - at the cost of making the application less functional, and less useful overall. > and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless You say as if this was a bug. It's a feature. This is the fact for any kind of complex, powerful tool - whether it's a combine harvester or furnace or industrial laser cutter - takes traning to use to its full power. Making software easy to use fully from the get-go only means making it not do much.

etjossem 10y ago
> Making software easy to use fully from the get-go only means making it not do much. False dichotomy. It is absolutely possible to write modern mass-market software and also offer complex functionality that wouldn't be needed by the average user. It is good practice from a UX perspective to avoid surfacing advanced features unless the user is actively looking for them (in your example, that's the experienced user). I like the graph, though.
blakeyrat 10y ago
> Making software easy to use fully from the get-go only means making it not do much. Back before people started spreading wrong ideas like this, we had things like HyperCard, which were both easy-to-learn and extremely powerful. Now we don't, because people like you seem to think the entire concept is impossible. It's not. It never was.

Grishnakh 10y ago

>I think young people tend to fetishize old tech because they weren't there when it was used. Floppy failures were common, IRQ issues, programs taking down the entire OS, no real security, and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless. You sound young to me. Back in the 80s, computers were quite reliable, they just couldn't do that much. Floppies were extremely reliable; they had to be because the computers back then ran entirely on floppies. Only really expensive computers had hard drives until the very late 80s. It wasn't until the mid/late 90s that floppy drives became unreliable, because everyone stopped using them for anything except Windows drivers and the manufacturing of them (both drives and disks) went to low-cost areas and the quality went down the tubes. IRQ issues were a problem with DOS and Windows machines with ISA cards; before that on things like C=64s, there was no such thing. Security wasn't a problem back then, because no one was connected to a network; the best they had was telephone modems to connect to Compu$erve or BBSes. Viruses started becoming a real problem when everyone moved to DOS and downloaded stuff from BBSes. Back in the Apple ][ and C=64 days, security was unnecessary. Even over on the Internet-connected UNIX side (something mainly only used by college people, not by people with C=64s), security didn't become a big issue until Morris's worm in 1988. As for CLI taking longer to learn, perhaps, but I remember office secretaries using DOS just fine, unlike these days where everyone has no clue what to do with a command line and is terrified of it. They might not have done really advanced stuff, but learning a few DOS commands like COPY and MOVE and DEL really isn't that hard for someone with half a brain. As for "standardization", I don't know where you get that idea. Tons of people are having all kinds of problems with their Windows software not working on Windows 10, older peripherals not working on Win10, etc. How long did it finally take us to have some standardization on the web, after dealing with IE6 for so long? We didn't have these problems back in the text-only days. And again, over on the UNIX side, they had much better attempts at standardization with the X protocol, which allowed remote GUI access between completely different UNIX OSes, in the 80s. It took ages for anything similar to arrive on Windows machines.