It’s the strength of the metaphor. People were used to computers where a green cursor blinks on the screen, and in a separate printed manual you find the neces

It’s the strength of the metaphor. People were used to computers where a green cursor blinks on the screen, and in a separate printed manual you find the necessary incantations for how to make it do something: “To enter replace mode, press the Q key and type the line number to be modified.” On the Mac, these actions and objects and modes were on-screen physical metaphors that you could simply “reach out and grab” (with the indirection layer of the mouse, of course). Draw with a pencil, and if you don’t like the result, take it out with the eraser. No manual to read, no keys to remember. Even files used this strong visual metaphor: each floppy disk was represented as basically a 2D space containing the files exactly where you left them. Drag your files into a circle formation if you want, and they’ll be in the same arrangement when you put in the floppy next week. To delete something, you’d drag it into the trash can (a feature on which Apple held such strong IP that it didn’t appear in Windows until 1995).