Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
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From: bmb@bluemoon.uucp (Bryan Bankhead)
Subject: Virtual Manipulation
Message-ID: <XmsD32w164w@bluemoon.uucp>
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Date: Wed, 22 May 91 23:52:56 EDT


Doug Thompson's post on virtual manipulation seems to suggest 'why doesn't 
everybody just use unix?'  It seems to me he has been stuck too long in a 
mini-mainframe environment.  My perspective on computer use is 180 degrees 
from his.  I am an inverterate micro user and welcome the comins supremacy 
of the GUI.
Says Thompson:
        "
The majority of the people using computers in the world today,
however, have had only hours or days of training on computers, though
many years of training with paper and writing. The great marketplace
demand for GUI is mostly generated by those who *do* have problems
with command line interfaces, problems relating mostly to lack of
training and/or experience. In order to provide relatively
inexperienced customers with workable computer tools, the industry has
gone to great lengths to build interfaces which minimize the need for
experience or training.
"
The Problem is thay anyone who uses a new application of any type is an 
inexperienced user no matter how much computer experience they have. 
Command line environments like unix invariably come with a package on 
applications like VI editor which the user inevitably uses forevermore 
world without end amen.  And traditional mainframe/mini environment tend 
to have a VERY slender body of applications compared with the micro world.
Thompson again:
"Sometimes I wonder if this isn't exactly like building a machine into     

which you can plug a book, a machine which will proceed to act like a
tape recorder and whose speaker will begin to 'read' the book to you
out loud in the best Queen's English.  If you have customers who can't
read, but are comfortable with the spoken word, that machine might
sell very well. "
I view a gui more like a machine you can plug ANYTHING into from a 16 
track digital sound editor to a biochemical sythesizer and operate it.

Thompson again:
"If our population has grown up with unix computers in the classroom as
well as pens and paper, and if the typical high school graduate had 12
years of computer experience as wella s 12 years with reading and
writing on paper, I suspect that GUI design teams would be doing
things a LOT differently.
"

Seems pretty damn optimistic, this assuption that the future is going to 
be THAT standardized.  That 12 years experience is useless when he runs 
into an unfamiliar application or an application with new capabilities. 
With command line interfaces it's back to the phone book sized manual to 
memorize 200+ more commands ...  Personally since guis allow operation 
independent of system type I think they represent a more probable outcome 
than everybody using unix.
Thompson again:
        "Just as it is not especially efficient to put written things into 
oral
form often, it is not necessarily efficient to put a list of titles
for a library into *visual* form, in the way the library stacks are in
visual form. Perhaps the more efficient mode of presentation is a
highly abstract kind of shorthand and the best interface for many
things is not the one that makes something look like its pre-computer
counterpart, but something that reduces the large and bulky to its     
most basic and meaninfgul essence.
"
Actually unix is as visual as any GUI!!! But I find an Icon and menu to be 
a more efficient form of shorthand than most any unix system gobbledegook.
Anything that reduced huge unix system manuals to something on a screen 
seems to be reducing the bulky and large to me!

Finally Thompson:
" 
If we can reduce the content of a 3-D display and simulated physical
motion to a single character or string which conveys the same meaning,
have we not advanced?"

If you want to do that with a GUI familiar enough you can write a macro. 
And an Icon and a menu does this without having to keep straight 1000 new 
primitive every time I move to a new environment.

I know the coming supremacy of GUI's and VR's is causing stress among unix 
freaks, and will gradually invalidate all the time and effort they spent 
learning it. But in the world of the future there will just be too much 
going on in dataland and it will changing to fast to fit through the 
needle (and learning curve) of command line interfaces. GUI's ARE the 
future

 This is from
     bmb@bluemoon.uucp
     bmb%bluemoon@nstar.rn.com
who doesn't have their own obnoxious signature yet
