[stoolpigeon]

The first time I saw a personal computer was at the home of a friend. His father was an engineer for Ping and they had a computer at their house. We weren't allowed to touch it but we watched his dad play a Star Trek game on it for a little while.

A couple years later I'd get my hands on a TRS-80 at school. I loved it.

When I went to high school in 1983 we had the Apple IIe in our lab. I spent hours on them doing basic and later Pascal. By then I had a vic-20 at home. I was a part of a nerdy group that hung out in the computer lab any time we could and we had a pretty good relationship with the head of the match department. When they go their first Mac, that was the first time I saw gui in person.

We were given a few minutes to play with it and I really liked it. I don't think it was so shocking though. While the command line was my normal initial interface, I was used to playing games that provided a GUI of their own to interact with the game. The gui on the mac was another program like a game running on top of the OS.

After high school I didn't have a pc of my own for years. When I did get one is was a Packard Bell sx386 running DOS. I had that for a decent amount of time before I got my first copy of windows. For me it all just fit together and I would say to this day I think of a computer and it's operating system as the CLI it provides. The GUI is an abstraction that runs on top. I like a nice desktop ( KDE is my favorite ) but I get very frustrated any time I can't get underneath it and do what I want. My first instinct any time I hit a problem that feels difficult, is to drop to the shell.

[mjhagen]

> The gui on the mac was another program like a game running on top of the OS.

I presume you speak metaphorically, but just in case. Macintosh wasn't like that, the GUI was the OS, which is what made it so different from Microsoft's attempts, no DOS to drop down to.