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I find this sort of complexity absolutely fascinating: I imagine it is similar intellectually to learning of a new order or family in biology: you understand th
by bonaldi 8y ago
I find this sort of complexity absolutely fascinating: I imagine it is similar intellectually to learning of a new order or family in biology: you understand the mechanisms and underpinning goals, but the mechanisms and results are wholly foreign to you.
Had a similar experience with the Bloomberg terminal, which is a similar evolutionary offshoot. (Think "what if the GUI had never happened, but the 3270 form-style CLI had gained a mouse and graphical representations?")
- aasasd 8y agoI mean, DOS had plenty of pseudo-graphical interfaces in the 90s: Norton Commander, Borland IDEs and such, down to the use of the mouse―so it's rather weird seeing people treating that paradigm as completely alien.
- bonaldi 8y agoI am explaining it quite poorly. It's different from Commander etc because they were (to my mind) essentially WIMP interfaces. You could use them with a keyboard, but it wasn't really the paradigm. BBG's terminal is fundamentally still keyboard-driven: you can use the mouse, but in the same way you can use a mouse with emacs: you're going to be driven back to the keyboard sooner or later, so you might as well stay there. There are some introductions on YouTube, but they're all horrible. I'll see if I can find a good one.