[OT] The lessons of Ion

Bob Sneidar bobs at twft.com
Mon Sep 20 13:05:58 EDT 2010


I suppose like anything else, a text based interface lends itself better to some things, but not others. Remember that the GUI was an experiment to see if a computer could look and feel more like people think, because outside the minority of "geeks" (as we were called back then and still are today) no one had the time or patience or cognitive abilities to memorize all those commands! I HATED DOS for just that reason! But I am fond of telling people today who complain about software bugs and the occasional program crash that the most stable OS I have ever used was DOS. 

So it all depends on what your goals are and how much time and effort you have or are willing to devote to getting there. I personally would love to be able to just start from scratch and write my own OS to work the way I would like. The trouble is, I also like beer and burgers and having a life, and those things are constantly getting in my way and taking up all my time. :-)

Bob


On Sep 18, 2010, at 6:25 PM, Peter Alcibiades wrote:

> No, I missed out on the fun with vi and ed.  I am old enough to remember text
> only interfaces however and felt that the GUI was a great liberation from
> them.  This was Macs, and for many years I bought into 'ease of use' and
> HIGs until the GUIs started to get more and more obtrusive and irritating
> and I began to think about why I was still doing things in some ridiculously
> complicated way - where were the shorcuts?  They were not there, because so
> much of the GUI we know and love today evolved in an era when there were
> lots of new users for whom things had to be dumbed down so they could have
> instant usability.  
> 
> At some point I realized that it is worth spending a few hours learning
> something unfamiliar in order to go three times as quickly and with much
> less irritation at the end of it. 




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