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?
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.