Jason LefkowitzI occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
Someone posted a reply saying that computers were harder in the past so it's fine they're hard now, which earned them an instant block. Thanks for identifying yourself as the kind of person I want nothing to do with
Kent Navalesi ☕️and FWIW it's questionable whether computers really were harder in the past.
@KentNavalesi I spent too much of my life trying to configure sound cards on MS-DOS, so I wouldn't say the past was perfect either 😆
I just like to think we can always do better.
Paul Cantrell@jalefkowit @KentNavalesi This is a question of great and genuine interest to me.
My Apple ][+ was definitely a hard brick wall to somebody who’d never used one. Also, any specific piece of software behaved in extremely limited, extremely consistent ways, so that once somebody had learned to use it, they could continue using it.
My first-gen iPhone was a miraculous device. I could hand it to somebody who’d never used a touch screen or a “smart“ phone of any kind, and they would — without exception! I tried this experiment multiple times! — be able to figure out how to use it just by experimentation and intuition. I really don’t think that’s true of iPhones now. But a current iPhone offers far more capabilities.
Were computers easier or harder in the past? Or just •differently• hard? How? Whose needs have we prioritized? Whose comfort?
mirth@inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi The 70s micro and early DOS PC and Mac era, really the whole floppy/tape era, had another thing going for it: If something went wrong you just turned it off and on again. Nothing you did on your BASIC coding disk could break your homework disk. None of this "if my kid plays with my phone for a minute my e-mails will be deleted, $200 worth of burritos will show up at my doorstep, and my co-workers will receive ten photos of their potty" situation.
SysAdmin1138@mirth @inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi This is unintentionally a parable of increasing automation increases the scale of disasters, and I have to think about this for a while.
@sysadmin1138 @inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi Interesting way of looking at it. Computers also went from being mostly a calculating and storage thing to having communication be the primary use for a lot of people, which complicates the situation.
Ian McDowall@inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi at the same time as the first iPhone was released, other phones (I worked for Symbian, a now extinct smartphone OS company) came with an extensive printed manual.
To be fair, you could guess most of it anyway but it shows the assumption that any device required a manual.
To be fair, you could guess most of it anyway but it shows the assumption that any device required a manual.
Julescelt@inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi The latest iOS update really pissed me off. And you're so right about the older apple systems, they were intuitive.
nellie-m@inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi
My very first computer was a (then somewhat outdated) Macintosh Performa. OS 7.6.11 iirc.
I loved it. It came with little tutorials like „mousing around“ for people who had never worked with a mouse, and it always seemed to provide several ways to achieve the thing you wanted. It all felt very intuitive to me.
Everyone around me was cursing their windows machines and I always said, get a Mac. The ones who did were happy, too.
So in my experience, these computers weren’t difficult to use.
Annelies Kamran, Ph.D.@KentNavalesi @jalefkowit but you didn't have to use them for every damn thing