stpeters@dawn.steinmetz (Dick St.Peters) (10/12/87)
In article <9725@brl-adm.ARPA> bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein) writes: >I do know that AT&T has had a fair amount of success in other >endeavors asking people to type in long strings of digits to contact When I first used the telephone, in rural NJ (yes, NJ does have rural areas) not all that far from where UNIX was born, our interface was different: we gave the operator the name of the family we wanted to call. It was a perfectly natural interface - after all, you do *talk* into the things. If you called the local theater, the operator would tell you what was playing before connecting you. >I've found (informally) that a person's >ability to adapt to a device is highly correlated with their >motivation to make use of it. Yep. Changing to "strings of digits" (we must have been among the last places in the US to do so) and those rotary dial widgets brought howls of protest, but as far as I know, nobody had their phone taken out. Five years later I was programming computers via the then-standard cardeater interface, making do with what was available. >It would be nice if people would perhaps rise above this hot-rod >mentality [...] >(user-friendly? to whom? Our administrators? scientists? >students? small warm-blooded animals of unspecified lineage?) Amen. -- Dick St.Peters GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@ge-crd.arpa uunet!steinmetz!stpeters