[gambler]

You're invoking an annoying and ridiculously overused false dichotomy that is as false today as it was 30 years ago. An interface that has fail-safes does not have to be annoying and clunky. In fact, interfaces that are annoying and clunky are a great contributor to human mistakes, because they require a lot of rote action, which encourages people not to pay attention and work on auto pilot.

If something has changed over these years, it's the overall understanding of design principles and their popularization. (Thanks, Don Norman and other people in the field!)

Training has nothing to do with it. Even if you can train a person to work with a badly designed system without making mistakes (often), designing the system well in the first place is almost always significantly easier and cheaper.

For example, accidental key presses can be easily prevented by requiring the user to type a command of reasonable length. Typing "reboot-all-workstations" is not that difficult, but it would definitely prevent the incident described in the article.

[SolarNet]

I think he was pointing out why it was built that way, not why it was that way. Today we know it is a false dichotomy, he was pointing out, back then, the world thought it wasn't.

[nightpool]

You know, I think that was the point of the comment. I might just be reading it wrong, but it seemed to me that he was decrying such interfaces, using obviously hyperbolic language like "pointless time-wasters" (in the context of something other people believed) and "the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds". It sounded to me like he was even slightly making fun of that worldview.

[smacktoward]

You are correct, making fun of it was my intention. I suppose next time I will have to hang a "WARNING: SARCASM" sign on my comment, to make sure everybody gets it :-D

[zaidf]

You're not taking into account the fact than what is considered bad and clunky interface today may have been the best in class 30 years ago.