rggoebel@water.UUCP (Randy Goebel LPAIG) (01/31/85)
The other day I sat my son Kari in front of a Macintosh for the first time, and ran MacPaint. My son had never seen a bit map screen or a mouse, but within half an hour he was adept at picking menu items, using the pull-down menus, cutting, filling, and erasing. I was relating this story to a colleaguethe following day, and someone overhearing the conversation proclaimed that ``...he must have read the documentation...'' I had to tell him that my son is three, and couldn't read yet. If business men marching off cliffs portrays the danger of using primitive computing systems then perhaps a three year old learning to use MacPaint indicates the joy of using a modern computing appliance. Incidently, Kari had played with another computer about six months earlier. It was an IBM PC/XT. He reports that bitmap displays, a mouse, and the MacPaint program provide a superior toy (at a lower price). Randy Goebel Logic Programming and Artificial Intelligence Group Computer Science Department University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA N2L 3G1 UUCP: {decvax,ihnp4,allegra}!watmath!water!rggoebel CSNET: rggoebel%water@waterloo.csnet ARPA: rggoebel%water%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa