> Back then very few people knew what to do when faced with this screen In the '80s, you could go into any computer store and see what prior visitors had been

> Back then very few people knew what to do when faced with this screen In the '80s, you could go into any computer store and see what prior visitors had been up to with the machines on display. And what you would very often find is evidence that the user before you had been trying to type English into the computer, to see whether it would converse, and that the user soon gave up after seeing nothing but error messages. It was incredibly common. People who didn't know anything about computers harbored a misunderstanding that you could just chat with them, like Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock in Star Trek, and they tried exactly that at the keyboard. Fast forward 40 years, and it finally works like they expect. So anyway, chatting with a computer at the blinking cursor is entirely discoverable. And if there's a prompt there for the human saying something like "try asking me anything in plain English", then quadruply so.