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I have to agree with you themacguffinman, for years I tried getting my mom to use Linux, but it never stuck. One year for Mother’s Day I got her an iPad and she

I have to agree with you themacguffinman, for years I tried getting my mom to use Linux, but it never stuck. One year for Mother’s Day I got her an iPad and she’s been happy with it and I rarely get tech support calls. Although computers are a great innovation and the human mind is powerful I think that the abstract thinking required to use computers to their full potential isn’t distributed across the human population evenly. There are so many problems that can’t be solved with computers either. Before you used to have a separate device for every activity in your life. Phone, video camera, scrap book, magazine etc. Now all those functions those items did can be rolled into one device. My mom can’t handle that her iPad is something more than a camera/Facebook machine. She asked me to delete Pages, the word processor that came with it, because she never uses it. I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with.

mwcampbell 6y ago
> I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with. TO expand on my other comment on this thread, I think what we need to do is train the next generation to handle and demand more, rather than lock them into appliances based on what the older generations supposedly can't handle. Maybe we need to look to historic systems like Lisp machines, NLS (the subject of Engelbart's "mother of all demos"), or the original PARC Smalltalk system to recapture a more ambitious vision for personal computers, from before Apple decided that they should be appliances.