rba@allegra.UUCP (08/21/83)
Although the field of cognitive ergonomics blossomed with the Gaithersburg conference there is a lot of early work that is not covered in the Proceedings. I have a review of the field "Cognitive Factors in Human Interaction with Computers" that includes 174 references and will be glad to send copies out. One of the most interesting studies of ed is the thesis by Ross Bott at UCSD in which he examines how novices learn basic concepts in using ed. Although I don't believe Bott every published this work it has been followed up by Clayton Lewis and Bob Mack of IBM and a report of their work is in the most recent ACM Transaction on Office Information Systems. I have some data showning that ed isn't such a bad editor. I replicated the Roberts tasks for subjects using ed and found that the performance of my subjects with ed approached the performance of some of Roberts subjects who used screen editors. Furthermore, append mode errors were quite infrequent, contrary to the wisdom about line oriented editors. However, these results should be considered with caution because of some methodological issues inherent in the comparison of text editors. This work appeared in TOOIS, again I'll send copies on request. Bob Allen allegra!rba