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> Why was it audible? Why not, one could ask. [...] > Even then, the idea of not hearing what's happening > on a phone line you're calling on was quite new,

> Why was it audible? Why not, one could ask. [...] > Even then, the idea of not hearing what's happening > on a phone line you're calling on was quite new, > and modems would default to exposing the user to the handshake audio. [...] > > All you had to do to silence the handshake was to send the command ATM0 > down the serial line before dialing. And I think the user was comforted by the ritual, as far as I can tell from conversations with my friends and scenes from pop culture like You've Got Mail. I am for using the computer's own low-level apparatus as progress bars, instead of the opaque logos or polished animated graphics, blocking the view like a royal guard. For example, I wish my laptop and my phone listed the shell's output during boot, like some Linux distros still do. Even though most users wouldn't fully understand it --- and I have to admit that even I don't understand a lot of it --- the quickly scrolling text is no worse than an animated spinner in conveying, "Loading..." I think most users, and I mean nontechnical, are okay with the exposure and even kind of like it. It makes them feel like they're in a spy movie. Some will never try to understand it and will just take it as a more-detailed progress spinner. Some will slowly become familiar with some of the lines, google them out of curiosity, and it may be the spark that lights them down the long trek to becoming a programmer. Isn't that one of our country's goals, to encourage kids to become programmers? Anyway, my point is, I came to programming from graphic design and front-end. I spend a lot of time thinking about user-interface design. But maybe I'm against the grain in wanting some of the architecture to be allowed to hang out. (Does that make me a Brutalist?)

manodocedoceu 9y ago
providing a common user with access to views and doorways to discovery and deeper technical understanding is essential to user-centric design. that's how we move the ball foward in terms of baseline system-fluency, which necessarily deepens progress at the cutting edge. Furthermore the widened technical prowess means yAy! for creativity and less exploitable asymmetry for our almost-friendly techno-fascist cohorts. Widening and deepening user involvement-- through portals, gateways, peepholes, and trap-doors-- into a labyrinth of techno-primitive toolmaking utopia.. hah What might that look like? Who knows? I have been thinking about the variation of user-modes represented, perhaps, as masks, deepening and widening layers of involvement, according to need, habit, curiosity and play. The relation between the masks and the nature of the masks is still in geststion. Here in SP (sao paulo), in the 13-story abandoned building we've transformed into an an artist residency and resource center, we're exploring the theme 'Ancestral/Astral' for an event set to take place in the middle of December. Ancest-ASTRAL-ity : The ideal state of discovering the essence of what makes us human, our roots, through exploratory perspectives of our shared heritage and created future. What has interested me personally since hearing about postmarkertOS is humans and tools: the psychology of tool use, our relationship with TECHNOS. A major theme that has remained constant throughout our human story is our use of tools to influence our future. How do we improve or make new tools? Usually with tools we've already built. You have two fuzzily-distinct elements: tools and techniques. But how would these design logix (like the boot-phase peephole you mentioned) materialize? Ideally this would happen on a mobile device running linux (im most interested in developing world megacities). Maybe start with easily malleable UI layers, that use modern web semantics (react × APIs). Make a boot-phase people have some interaction layers thst stimulate the curious user to explore what is happening. There are a lot of ways to do it, and all of them are right. If interested, u can find me in the postmarketOS matrix/freenode channel. Sorry if this does not meet aesthetic requirements, im on mobile.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I am reminded that VLC have a drop down menu in their settings window that allows more and more options to be exposed. In a bit of whimsy their entry for exposing all options is "master of the universe" (or some such).
joquarky 9y ago
Back when I was into amateur radio, I would listen to RF noise emitted from my computer, and I enjoyed the feedback which gave me a sense of what was going on. I could tell whether the computer was waiting, polling, or just really busy. We used to be able to tell how busy the computer is by listening to the hard drive click. As computers get quieter, this kind of feedback would be useful.
digi_owl 9y ago
I am so used to listen to HDDs, FDDs, optical drives and other mechanical storage that these days i wish phones and tablets with solid state storage would come with a small drive activity light or ui element. In particular as Android (at least all the versions i have interacted with) tends to "lock up" during heavy IO activity (i find Firefox to be particularly adept at triggering this for some reason), something i have come to believe is a deeply embedded behavior characteristic of the Linux kernel. And yes i live and die by the boot scroll, and hate any and all efforts to hide these things away under the "user friendly" banner.
dfox 9y ago
I'm completely with you on this, but there is one issue: many hardware platforms are simply incapable to show such scrolling text (or dump it into UART) fast enough in the early boot stages which is the reason why you don't today get that even on server-oriented distributions. Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to cater to users with this approach to computing.
- estebank 9y ago
  > Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to cater to users with this approach to computing. "Reticulating splines"
  - dfox 9y ago
    Maxis' games (ie. "Reticulating splines", but SimCity 4 does that to) and KSP also comes to mind for this, but in these cases the messages are obvious nonsense, which is not the case for KDE.

manodocedoceu 9y ago

providing a common user with access to views and doorways to discovery and deeper technical understanding is essential to user-centric design. that's how we move the ball foward in terms of baseline system-fluency, which necessarily deepens progress at the cutting edge. Furthermore the widened technical prowess means yAy! for creativity and less exploitable asymmetry for our almost-friendly techno-fascist cohorts. Widening and deepening user involvement-- through portals, gateways, peepholes, and trap-doors-- into a labyrinth of techno-primitive toolmaking utopia.. hah What might that look like? Who knows? I have been thinking about the variation of user-modes represented, perhaps, as masks, deepening and widening layers of involvement, according to need, habit, curiosity and play. The relation between the masks and the nature of the masks is still in geststion. Here in SP (sao paulo), in the 13-story abandoned building we've transformed into an an artist residency and resource center, we're exploring the theme 'Ancestral/Astral' for an event set to take place in the middle of December. Ancest-ASTRAL-ity : The ideal state of discovering the essence of what makes us human, our roots, through exploratory perspectives of our shared heritage and created future. What has interested me personally since hearing about postmarkertOS is humans and tools: the psychology of tool use, our relationship with TECHNOS. A major theme that has remained constant throughout our human story is our use of tools to influence our future. How do we improve or make new tools? Usually with tools we've already built. You have two fuzzily-distinct elements: tools and techniques. But how would these design logix (like the boot-phase peephole you mentioned) materialize? Ideally this would happen on a mobile device running linux (im most interested in developing world megacities). Maybe start with easily malleable UI layers, that use modern web semantics (react × APIs). Make a boot-phase people have some interaction layers thst stimulate the curious user to explore what is happening. There are a lot of ways to do it, and all of them are right. If interested, u can find me in the postmarketOS matrix/freenode channel. Sorry if this does not meet aesthetic requirements, im on mobile.

digi_owl 9y ago
I am reminded that VLC have a drop down menu in their settings window that allows more and more options to be exposed. In a bit of whimsy their entry for exposing all options is "master of the universe" (or some such).

joquarky 9y ago

Back when I was into amateur radio, I would listen to RF noise emitted from my computer, and I enjoyed the feedback which gave me a sense of what was going on. I could tell whether the computer was waiting, polling, or just really busy. We used to be able to tell how busy the computer is by listening to the hard drive click. As computers get quieter, this kind of feedback would be useful.

digi_owl 9y ago

I am so used to listen to HDDs, FDDs, optical drives and other mechanical storage that these days i wish phones and tablets with solid state storage would come with a small drive activity light or ui element. In particular as Android (at least all the versions i have interacted with) tends to "lock up" during heavy IO activity (i find Firefox to be particularly adept at triggering this for some reason), something i have come to believe is a deeply embedded behavior characteristic of the Linux kernel. And yes i live and die by the boot scroll, and hate any and all efforts to hide these things away under the "user friendly" banner.

dfox 9y ago

I'm completely with you on this, but there is one issue: many hardware platforms are simply incapable to show such scrolling text (or dump it into UART) fast enough in the early boot stages which is the reason why you don't today get that even on server-oriented distributions. Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to cater to users with this approach to computing.

estebank 9y ago
> Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to cater to users with this approach to computing. "Reticulating splines"
- dfox 9y ago
  Maxis' games (ie. "Reticulating splines", but SimCity 4 does that to) and KSP also comes to mind for this, but in these cases the messages are obvious nonsense, which is not the case for KDE.