[TriLUG] User Friendliness

[Magnus Hedemark]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Jeff Tickle wrote:

> You make a good point... and the world would be such a better place if
> people would take time to actually learn a little bit about this magic
> box that gives them email and Solitare.  Microsoft would love to make it
> just that, too, so that none of the people would ever think "Ooh, maybe
> I can make Solitare better!  Or even write my own software!"  (too
> late.)

In the early days of Microsoft, users *were* more sophisticated.  They had 
to know how to write batch files, use the command line, etc.  They even 
usually had to know a thing or two about memory management, IRQ's, DMA's 
and more.  Now I don't miss the hardware conflicts a bit, or having to 
push stuff into higher memory addresses to keep as much of that precious 
lower 640K free as possible.  Even in the days of 16 bit Windows this was 
an issue.  Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.1 were the first significant 
milestones in dumbing down the users, IMO.  And since they were just 
straight ripoffs of Mac OS and OS/2, respectively, we only have Apple and 
IBM to blame for dumb users.  ;-)