[Star Traveler]

In case others don’t know...

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Internet publication

TidBITS has been published weekly since April 16, 1990, which makes it one of the longest running Internet publications. TidBITS is published by Adam C. Engst, author of a number of computer books, including four editions of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, Eudora for Windows & Macintosh Visual Quickstart Guide, and five editions of iPhoto for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide.

Electronic books

TidBITS also publishes a series of electronic books in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format that cover issues related to Mac OS X and the digital lifestyle. The “Take Control” series first appeared in October 2003 with the publication of Take Control of Upgrading to Panther which was issued at the same moment as the official launch of Mac OS X version 10.3 “Panther”.

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TidBITS ]

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And I’ve subscribed to their mailing list almost from the beginning. And I remember getting Adam Engst’s “Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh” when it wasn’t necessarily so easy getting on the Internet... :-)

I remember the one for Eudora, too. That was a favorite e-mail program of mine for a very long time. And then, I’ve got a series of the “Take Control” e-books put out by Adam Engst, too.

Practically all of what he has written there is very true. I had to laugh at the characterization of “teenagers” in the past and then “now”... That was right, in the past, if you wanted a computer fixed or tweaked or help with it — yeah..., “get a teenager”. But, nowadays, the teenagers have to get help from the older folks... LOL...

Heck, when I was a teenager, I was programming those new-fangled things in Base 2, with no monitor and only red lights for read-outs for Base 2 indications of on/off and paper tape to save the programming. I had to program everything, down to even telling it how to multiply and divide... Assembly language... ummm..., *I was the assembler*... LOL...

Assembly language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language

And so, these youngsters are getting quite computer illiterate these days. And a good User Interface is great (I believe in it), but it has probably contributed to the “dumbing down” of the average computer user, to the point where you get those kinds of “tech support” calls, as was indicated in that article.

I like the Mac OS X, because it can be as simple as you want — and then — as complex as you want, both at the same time and accommodating both kinds of people. That’s great. But, alas, there is a large group out there that have absolutely no clue as to what is going on... :-)

[Swordmaker]

Heck, when I was a teenager, I was programming those new-fangled things in Base 2, with no monitor and only red lights for read-outs for Base 2 indications of on/off and paper tape to save the programming. I had to program everything, down to even telling it how to multiply and divide... Assembly language... ummm..., *I was the assembler*... LOL...

Hey, are you sure you haven't stolen my memories???

[Swordmaker]

Actually, I was a bit old for that... but I was one of the teenagers that was selected by Bell Labs to make my own NPN transistor... They provided everything I needed including a 2” diameter silicon wafer, the doping chemicals (which I had to mix correctly), and a lot of theoretical texts that I had to extract HOW out of. It worked. The following year, I was selected to build a voice simulator... Wow... by changing capacitors I could get it to say AAAAHHHHH, EEEEEEHHHHH, OOOOOHHHHH, UUUUUUH, Ihhhhh. etc. Consonants were beyond it.

[Terpfen]

And a good User Interface is great (I believe in it), but it has probably contributed to the “dumbing down” of the average computer user, to the point where you get those kinds of “tech support” calls, as was indicated in that article.

I disagree. A good user interface is supposed to make "power user" features easily accessible to the average person. When people identify "the blue E" or "Outlook" as their browser, it's because of a specific failure of the interface to distinguish environments in a way that is understandable to the technologically illiterate. I'm starting to think that operating systems should include video tutorials (like the Video Professor stuff) as an opt-in introduction presented the first time someone boots their shiny new computer. Visual cues are a great way to distill what is considered an abstract field.

And to be fair, "Web browser" is an archaic term in 2009. The ability to access the Internet has taken on a specific name: "Internet Explorer." That in itself is a pretty big failure, and it's what happens when you let computer engineers design user interfaces. They assume that everyone else has the same level of technological expertise as they do, and so it's assumed that the user does not need to have concepts distilled to them. This is the big failing of Windows, and it's why people don't know about the concept of a web browser. And since people already just associate Google with the Internet, it's going to be infuriating when Chrome OS comes out, as it will be specifically constructed to present Google as the Internet, period. If it catches on, you're now going to hear "Google" as a response to "What operating system are you using?" and "What web browser are you using?" and "What web site are you using?" Good luck troubleshooting THAT.