[gumby]

I think this is an undergrad paper published on a blog.

It’s hard to see if this article is really making a legit point, from a confusing typos early (swapping “form” and “function”, or claiming beige was used in software, when all displays were monochrome back then) to pulling out random historical artifacts apparently without understanding them (the Star’s portrait display was not “distinct”; on the contrary the switch to landscape happened in the mid 80s; the first Mac had both a distinct physical design and graphic clues like the trash can and floppy disk; those were not introduced in the 80s, etc).

Laid upon that are a few anodyne design “observations” that have been common in graphic design articles since the early 20th century.

[pjc50]

The claim was that beige was the color of hardware (accompanied by a link discussing this claim). Portrait displays have never been very common (TVs were always landscape). This feels like a particularly picky bit of nitpicking.

[gumby]

Criticizing a comment for its picayune choice of criticism is quite reasonable, but in this case I don't think applicable.

I simply picked those as examples right from the beginning of the essay: the old workstations like Alto, Dorado, Dolphin, Dandelion (Star), CADR, LMI, Explorer, PERQ, blt, and even the old AAA were all portrait. That was the context into which the Star was released. It was seemingly the workstation form factor until the arrival of the PC. Likewise the sentence reading "Early computing and software stuck to shades of black, white, and beige" (emphasis mine). I only mentioned the nonsense about the trashcan later to demonstrate that this was a pervasive problem, rather than merely one brainfart at the beginning of the essay, which could have simply been poor editing.

A deeper example (which I cited) also shows up right up front: the complete misunderstanding of form vs function that implies the author really didn't know what they were talking about (to cite that is to pull in a century of famous discussion; if you don't understand it how could your argument reply upon it?)

I could go on but this essay isn't worth my (or your) time. There is a very interesting argument to be made on this topic, but this blog post isn't it.

[makk]

Yeah, what is going on with the a16z blog?