[Mongoose]

Good point. Luddite is the wrong word. I meant to say that there should be some minimum assumed level of expertise of your target market. "Intuitive" is often synonymous with "familiar," and an interface should be able to make some assumptions about the experience and abilities of the user.

[10ren]

The computer in question was pretty much the first personal computer. The correct assumption about the amount of experience of the user with a personal computer was zero.

[_phred]

It's a case for better technical documentation, which was later fixed by putting a beveled rectangle around CONTROL and other modifier keys in written documentation. What he attempted to do was technically accurate given the instructions.

It's really hard to write technically accurate instructions, or at least it must be, because so many instructions are ambiguous. I followed a "friendship bread" recipe that said to, after making the batter, "put 1 cup of batter into four bags." What they meant was, "put 4 cups of batter into 4 separate bags."

After baking, I had a sloppy loaf, and got ribbed by my wife for, "not following the instructions." When I pointed out that what I did was technically accurate, she said I should have done what they "obviously" meant, not what they literally said.

Anyway, the bread was still good. :-)