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by ziml77 1701 days ago
No, he's not right. A computer is a tool. A tool should help you accomplish tasks. A well-designed tool that is meant to be used in the average household should be easy to use and hard to screw up. It shouldn't feel like it's getting in the way.

There's no reason why anyone should need to know the details of how a computer works to use the computer. The history you're so eager to tell should just be trivia.
2 comments
magicalhippo 1701 days ago
> There's no reason why anyone should need to know the details of how a computer works to use the computer.

Paraphrasing the CEO of Sun Microsystems (IIRC): you don't need to know how to operate a nuclear power plant to get light when you flick the light switch.

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agumonkey 1701 days ago
Have you ever tried to teach people how to use a computer or is that paper talk ? because in theory everything is well designed, but very few things are.

Of course "in theory" good tools are solid and simple.. in reality bro how insane the world is. Every update, every fix, changes the poor ground of habits users tried to build. Just yesterday I had to help a neighbor because she couldn't grasp a word document embedding a invisible table as layout forbidding the caret to move right as she used too. I think you're very much misunderstanding the vastness of psychologies, of tooling variations, of hidden variables and parameters and the immense layering of software.

People are confused by the slightest change in computer interaction. How do you want to make them understand when to click, double click, right click, drag, press. What's an URL, what happens when they click save, why errors or not ? people don't even know what saving a file is. Really, go in any office you can pick 30% of users totally clueless about folders and files.

Every attempt at hiding information causes trouble, it taps into shallow understanding and rote memory. People become mere users and it sucks. History is interesting, details are interesting, your brain loves it, if it's tied to a tangible concept and use for the people. It's not about making VBA6 classes or a talk about Linus Torvalds acrobatics for the sake of geek pleasure. It's to situate what are the reasons (as in reasoning) for why things are the way they are. Even your keyboard has a long history.

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