roberts@cognos.uucp (Robert Stanley) (11/18/87)
On the subject of human factors anecdotes, I still have a pocket calculator in my possession which bears the following splendid admonition: Warning: flashing display does not indicate battery low; battery low is signaled by wrong answer. It's true, too! However, wrong answer turns out to mean the display disintegrates to a constant of zero, but.... A colleague also pointed out an interesting twist on what might best be described as user perspective. He uses an Apple Macintosh as a workstation, and regularly runs a VT100 terminal emulator through to one of our UNIX boxes. File transfer between the systems is accomplished using a pair of UNIX utilities named macGET and macPUT. He reports a regular problem when working through the Mac on the UNIX box deciding which to use to move a file onto the Mac. Is he "on the Mac" GETting a UNIX file (not the case, though this is what he thinks of himself as doing) or "on UNIX" PUTting a UNIX file onto the Mac (the actual case). As networking increases, there will be more and more situations in which the single screen/keyboard will in fact represent any number of environments, with no easy way to gut-level (as opposed to intellectually) distinguish between them. Finally, discussing programming languages today I was reminded of the problems of using APL on an IBM 1130. To distinguish between lower, middle, and upper shifts on the minuscule keyboard, you had to look at the system register status lights! Truly, things do improve, albeit slowly. Robert_S -- R.A. Stanley Cognos Incorporated S-mail: P.O. Box 9707 Voice: (613) 738-1440 (Research: there are 2!) 3755 Riverside Drive FAX: (613) 738-0002 Compuserve: 76174,3024 Ottawa, Ontario uucp: decvax!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!roberts CANADA K1G 3Z4 -- R.A. Stanley Cognos Incorporated S-mail: P.O. Box 9707 Voice: (613) 738-1440 (Research: there are 2!) 3755 Riverside Drive FAX: (613) 738-0002 Compuserve: 76174,3024 Ottawa, Ontario uucp: decvax!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!roberts CANADA K1G 3Z4