[orionblastar]

I have worked in IT a long time. I learned during the 1980s as a teenager with a Commodore 64 at home and Apple 2 and IBM PCs at high school. This was before the GUI. Everything was text based and shortcut keys.

I remember people claiming that the GUI makes people lazy and dumber. There was an article called "Does the Mac make you stupid?" At the time were they split an English class in two and half used a Mac and the other half a DOS PC. The students who used the Mac had made more errors and got lower scores than those who used the PC. Then the students switched places and computers and those who used the PC had higher scores and the Mac lower scores. It was a big debate and flame war on the BBSes at the time.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~lrm22/technology/stupidmac.html

It was a MacWorld article I scanned to a PDF one time but lost it. I had photocopies from 1990 that I scanned in a few years ago or so.

Keyboard shortcuts can speed up work but to a user who is not computer savvy they need the mouse and GUI.

As a programmer my goal always was to make things easier for the user where they don't have to think to use my UI UX etc that it is intuitive.

[redsummer]

If anyone could find the original Levy article, I would be interested. GUIs create a sort of 'Learned helplessness', where people are deliberately handicapped in their knowledge. It's as if you never learnt to read, and relied on an app which reads text with a speech synthesiser.

[orionblastar]

I think the whole magazine is here: https://ia801307.us.archive.org/16/items/mac_MacWorld_9011_N...

That is the PDF version.

https://archive.org/details/mac_MacWorld_9011_November_1990

Page 69 is where it starts, IIRC.

It was very contralesional when it came out, The PC had DOS and the Mac had the GUI before Windows 3.X got very popular.

The irony now is that everyone uses a GUI, is it just the Mac GUI that makes people stupid or is it every GUI out there?

I'm trying to teach friends and family members to fill out forms online. While it is very easy for me, for them it is not so easy. If they want a job, they have to fill out forms on a website.