Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell!pacbell.com!mips!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!paperboy!sauron!hankin From: hankin@sauron.osf.org (Scott Hankin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: Low cost Mac's ? Message-ID: Date: 31 Aug 90 14:17:52 GMT References: <25541.26DA84DD@stjhmc.fidonet.org> <1385@gold.GVG.TEK.COM> <1990Aug30.194221.29942@phri.nyu.edu> <11219@claris.com> <1990Aug31.021020.7897@phri.nyu.edu> Sender: news@OSF.ORG Lines: 61 roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: >I wrote: >> I defy you to show me a single program that runs on a Macintosh that my >> mother can use with no more than 30 seconds worth of one-time instruction. >peirce@claris.com (Michael Peirce) responded: >> The closest is the original MacPaint. It's always what I tell people to >> try first and most people are drawing ugly pictures very quickly. > Close, but no cigar. I remember my first experience with a Mac, >just after it was introduced. There was a demo machine sitting out in one >of the labs, running MacPaint. I don't remember exactly if I managed to get >the drawing tools to work or not, but I do remember being very frustrated >that no matter what I typed on the keyboard, nothing came up on the screen. >Now, a few years later, it's second nature to click on the icon of the big >"A" then to click on an insertion point to type text in a paint/draw >program, but back then, it wasn't obvious at all. > Maybe, if I had a manual, or even had somebody to give me a >30-second "this is what you do" talk, I would have gotten the hang of it, >but left to my own devices, I was totally and completely stumped. >-- >Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute >455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 >roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy >"Arcane? Did you say arcane? It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!" Close, but no cigar. If your first response to MacPaint on a Mac was to try to type in commands on the keyboard, you certainly are not a computer novice. You are a computer user with preconceived expectations based on your past computer experience. Certainly understandable, but not withing the bounds of the original statement. Besides, as implied by your .sig, Unix warps one's thinking about computers! ;-} (As woody Allen would say) It just so happens that I had my mother over shortly after getting my Mac. Also a bright lady, with her Master's degree, etc. but not at all a computer person - far from it. I did give her a 30 second (well, maybe two minute) one-time walkthrough of MacPaint. I went away and came back twenty minutes later, and she had captured the essense of Picasso's primative period with work of her own. Granted, this was the limit of her artistic abilities, but she had a ball and even titled it at the bottom (i.e. with the keyboard.) More importantly, the experience with MacPaint shaped her expectations as well. When I showed her MacWrite (the only other program I had at the time) her reaction to the pulldown menus and mouse clicking on interesting graphic thingys that looked like they might want to be clicked on was to comment on how it was a lot like MacPaint, only different. This is the essence of the Mac interface. If you run two randomly chosen applications on the PC, there is very little likelihood that anything you picked up from the first program will be at all applicable to the second. - Scott --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scott Hankin (hankin@osf.org) | "You're not entirely committed to sanity, Open Software Foundation | are you?"