jrd@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM (John R. Dunning) (12/23/87)
Date: 21 Dec 87 16:00:31 GMT
From: rminnich@louie.udel.edu (Ron Minnich)
In article <11191@oliveb.UUCP> dragon@olivej.olivetti.com (Give me a quarter or
I'll touch you) writes:
>
>I think that these arguments aren't representative of an *average* user,
>since an average user is more likely not to own a modem. Making a backup
I didn't want to jump into this before, as it sounds like a religious
argument, but I have to agree with rminnich. Computers are here to be
used by humans, not to force the humans to limit their ways of doing
things.
I can't believe this discussion. Here we are, all us good hacker
types, arguing that Joe Average is Too Limited, The Poor Soul,
to really Appreciate the Beauty of Multi-Tasking (*cue Heavenly Choir*)
You would be surprised what Joe Average can do. He is pretty
smart. I have seen this any number of times: once the light goes
on in Mr. Average's head, he (and she, of course) will never
want to give multi-tasking up.
Exactly. My girlfriend (a recent convert to computing) often says
things like "But why can't I just do this while that's going?", or "Why
do I have to get out of this thing just to look at that thing?" Often
I have a real hard time explaining why what she's asking for is any
harder than doing a single operation. It seems "natural" to her that
the computer should be able to do more than one thing at a time, and
that's how she expects to use it. I'm not a psychologist, but I bet if
you could find one that's studied this area, they'll tell you that what
we hackers call multi-tasking is similar to how people work and think.
The 'oh but desk accessories are ok' is a specious argument.
Desk accessories are a kludge-o form of multi-tasking. If you
want to argue that Desk Accessories are a good thing, then you
are arguing FOR multi-tasking.
Right. Sure, it's possible to cut corners on the implementation, and
get some of the benefits of real multi-tasking cability without doing
all the support necessary for the real thing, and I'm not saying that's
not useful. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that what you're
doing isn't an attempt at a multi-tasking envronment.