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> I believe that companies made computers difficult to use for whatever reasons, be they catering to “power users”, business or just plain inattention to the no

by Gormo 2y ago

> I believe that companies made computers difficult to use for whatever reasons, be they catering to “power users”, business or just plain inattention to the non-techie user. I don't think that's quite accurate. "Power users" are simply the users who bothered to learn how computers work. Dumbing technology down to the level of people who couldn't be be so bothered is precisely what's lead to all of the centralization and abuse. It's also diminished the value of the technology itself, since simplifying user interfaces to a level that fails to express the inherent complexity of the system makes its full functionality inaccessible. Trying to make things "easy" leads to making them less powerful, less adaptable to the needs of the user, and less accessible and responsive to users who do care to learn how they work. At the end of the day, there's simply no way to attain the full value of technology without significant risk exposure if you don't put at least a little time and effort into understanding it.

k310 2y ago
I remember when "power users" were the ones who wrote reviews (free publicity). The classic story is Jerry Pournelle, who started writing but became hooked on personal computers themselves, and I would read his stories of the evolving hardware and software. It became clear that vendors would feed him new products so that they could score in the articles he wrote. [0] > Along the way, he began to write, but wasn’t able to publish. “I became an aerospace engineer, not a professional writer” > “I paid Tony Pietsch to build me the best machine he could, and paid him $12,000 all told,” Pournelle noted. The computer ran a program called Electric Pencil, the first word processing program for home computers, which had been released just the year before. Pournelle later began using a program that Pietsch programmed, which offered some improvements over Electric Pencil. > Authors saw the potential immediately. “Larry Niven saw my system, loved it, and had Tony Pietsch build him two of them,” Pournelle recalled. When he later threw a party at his home, a number of other authors “saw my system and wanted one. Greg Benford got Tony to build him a copy, and several others got Tony to find them someone local to them who’d do it for them.” The race to adopt the PC was on. IIRC, he tired of becoming a computer reviewer. It was a long time ago, and old copies of Byte Magazine are online.[1] I think it was Byte. Old timers (make that microcomputer pioneers) can correct me if I remembered this poorly. [0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/jerry-pournelle-and-personal-computer/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/jer... [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine P.S. I was one of those power hungry types and got into Unix in a serious way around the time of the Mac Classic/Plus. The Mac won on fontography, Unix on insane productivity. I would reduce data, and write reports with data plots in a couple of days while the personal computer users took a week. grap, pic, troff.
- Gormo 2y ago
  IIRC, Jerry Pournelle was was still writing hardware and software reviews right up until the very end, well after Byte. He was publishing on his own Chaos Manor blog, which was always a great read.

by Gormo 2y ago

k310 2y ago

I remember when "power users" were the ones who wrote reviews (free publicity). The classic story is Jerry Pournelle, who started writing but became hooked on personal computers themselves, and I would read his stories of the evolving hardware and software. It became clear that vendors would feed him new products so that they could score in the articles he wrote. [0] > Along the way, he began to write, but wasn’t able to publish. “I became an aerospace engineer, not a professional writer” > “I paid Tony Pietsch to build me the best machine he could, and paid him $12,000 all told,” Pournelle noted. The computer ran a program called Electric Pencil, the first word processing program for home computers, which had been released just the year before. Pournelle later began using a program that Pietsch programmed, which offered some improvements over Electric Pencil. > Authors saw the potential immediately. “Larry Niven saw my system, loved it, and had Tony Pietsch build him two of them,” Pournelle recalled. When he later threw a party at his home, a number of other authors “saw my system and wanted one. Greg Benford got Tony to build him a copy, and several others got Tony to find them someone local to them who’d do it for them.” The race to adopt the PC was on. IIRC, he tired of becoming a computer reviewer. It was a long time ago, and old copies of Byte Magazine are online.[1] I think it was Byte. Old timers (make that microcomputer pioneers) can correct me if I remembered this poorly. [0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/jerry-pournelle-and-personal-computer/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/jer... [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine P.S. I was one of those power hungry types and got into Unix in a serious way around the time of the Mac Classic/Plus. The Mac won on fontography, Unix on insane productivity. I would reduce data, and write reports with data plots in a couple of days while the personal computer users took a week. grap, pic, troff.

Gormo 2y ago
IIRC, Jerry Pournelle was was still writing hardware and software reviews right up until the very end, well after Byte. He was publishing on his own Chaos Manor blog, which was always a great read.