Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!zooey.Berkeley.EDU!c162-fe
From: c162-fe@zooey.Berkeley.EDU (Jonathan Dubman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: User friendly?
Message-ID: <887@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Date: 19 Feb 88 21:20:44 GMT
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu
Reply-To: c162-fe@zooey.Berkeley.EDU (Jonathan Dubman)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 56

I think this classifies as a flame, so beware.  I love the Amiga, but I also
loved the Apple II and wouldn't use one now.  So here goes.

 * * *

It takes 1 minute to copy a disk on the Apple II, if you include the 20 seconds
to load the "fast copy" program.

It takes 10 minutes to copy a disk on the Amiga.

I wanted to back up a work disk and meanwhile draw some sprites in Dpaint.
I was in the CLI and did a "run diskcopy".  Diskcopy asked me to press
return, but because it was being run in the background, didn't accept any
input from my CLI.  It did, however, change my disk names to "DF0:BUSY" and
"DF1:BUSY", so that I couldn't access them.  With 1 meg of stuff loaded in
ram disk, I was forced to reboot the system.

So I booted up my off-the-shelf Workbench 1.2, intending to copy from there,
while running Dpaint.  Unfortunately, upon inserting the target disk, the
system just hung.  Apparently my target disk had some soft errors (nothing
wrong with the disk itself.)  But that didn't matter - I was about to
write over it!

Reboot again.  I picked a fresh disk.  I ran Dpaint and then pushed the
"screen to back" gadget, so I could do the disk copy.  Uh oh - Dpaint
closed the Workbench screen!  Arrgh!

So I booted a commercial copy program which effectively takes over the
machine.  So much for multitasking.

I have been wondering lately what the "next" generation of user-interfaces will
be like.  Where can we go from here, now that the ideas of the Macintosh user
interface have pretty much taken over?

I think the next user interface will recognize and exploit patterns in your
behavior, and additionally allow a natural language description of a command
that may actually involve many programs.

(Following paragraph will make Amiga owners feel good, if above story
 depressed them.)

If you want to hear me flame on high, ask me how long it took me to do a global
substituition of a carriage return for an asterisk on 37 Macintosh text files.
On top of the fact that the Mac had no "*" for referring to all the files in
the directory at once, MacWrite couldn't perform global substituition on
a carriage return.  The reason for all this?  A workaround for a bug in
Microsoft BASIC text file handling that I incurred in doing the workaround for
another bug in Microsoft BASIC that prevented any writing to the LaserWriter,
Apple's flagship printer.  Neither bug is fixed in the latest versions.)

Arrgh!  I just screwed up this whole file because I held down "j" with caps
lock on in VI.

Future generations will laugh at late '80s claims of "ease of use".

	*&(Jonathan Dubman)