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User interface and plug and pray

Kevin Chu (kevin@portal.ca)
Thu, 12 Feb 1998 22:57:21 -0800

>> We are not alone
>>
>> On Friday the 24th I was watching the NASA channel on cable TV to see
>> how the experiments and Shuttle crew were doing. The men onboard
>> needed to send instructions to the experiments in the cargo bay and
>> were using a laptop to do it. As some of you may have heard, there was
>> a "computer problem" onboard as reported by CNN. The exchange of
>> information between the crew and the Johnson Space Center (JSC) went
>> like this:
>>
>> Crew: Urgent Johnson, we can't get a DOS prompt
>> JSC: Press C: enter.
>> Crew: Heck, we're not familiar with all this
>> JSC: What screen are you looking at?
>> Crew: It says 'My Computer', and, er, various other icons
>> JSC: Click on 'Start' and then shut down.
>> Crew: You click the 'Start' button to shut down?
>> JSC: Yeah. Isn't it obvious?
>> Crew: Say again please.
>> JSC: Just hit the damn 'Start' button.
>> Crew: We can't do that. It didn't load a mouse
>> JSC: Didn't load any mouse at all?
>> Crew: Well, yeah, a PS/2 or something. But we don't have
>> one of those
>> JSC: Okay. Press Alt + Esc.
>> Crew: And what does that do?
>> JSC: It should help.
>> Crew: Negative
>> JSC: Stand by, will replicate the problem down here.
>> Crew: Roger
>> (Long pause)
>> JSC: Okay then. Double click the MS-DOS icon.
>> Crew: I don't have a mouse
>> JSC: Go to backup.
>> Crew: Which is what?
>> JSC: Dock with the Russians. They have a Unix Workstation
>> you can borrow.
>>
>> Matt Watson
>> EuroTRC
>> x
>> x mawatson@amsterdam.cisco.com
>> x (+31) 20 342 3308
>
> ------------------
> Quinton Jansen
> quintonj@ashta.com
>
> "if Microsoft is the Borg, does that make Janet Reno Captain Picard?"

Related story:

I'm using Win95 at work. I made a comment that I find the Win95 GUI not
very intuitive, compared to all the other GUIs I've used, and to most
command lines. I especially don't understand the new (compared to
Win3.1) File, Open dialog boxes in Word and Excel. The guy I made the
comment to probably thought I wasn't too smart.

Later in the day, I had to make my Word normal.dot template read only
because at work there are macro virii cirulating. When I commented that
I can't seem to find the attrib command, the same guy said I am "too
stuck on DOS." (You have to use the GUI to make a file read only.)

Just today, the same guy was printing something from his workstation
(running Win95), and he mentioned he was running several programs, and
multiple instances of one program, and he sent a large print job, and he
said he was surprised his computer didn't crash. I told him to think
about what he just said. He didn't understand. I told him that normal
people don't expect their computers to crash, and hinted that he was
running Win95 and had been conditioned to expect and perhaps accept
crashes. It took some more explaining for him to begin to understand,
and after I was finished, he still didn't think that he shouldn't expect
crashes, because "there's a limit on how much stuff you can run." Then,
he asked me, "can you run multiple things at the same time in unix?"

The guy I was talking to is literate with respect to DOS and Win95, and
using the typical Office applications. But like many people who work at
this company, their world ends with the PC and Microsoft. When he found
out I use Linux and OS/2 most of the time, he told me I should "get my
head out of my ass" and I have to use Win95 because that's what everyone
uses. When I said I probably would never have Win95 on my machine, but
would probably upgrade my DOS partition to NT, he just looked at me like
I'm a nut.

The computer I'm using at work is running Win95 and crashes or displays
"out of memory" messages about every half hour. 40% of the time there's
a guy from IS Support fixing the computer, installing antiviral (yes,
antiviral) software, etc.. The one time I watched the IS guy fix my
computer, he just deleted and reinstalled a printer. And we know that
that is a general fix for WHICH environments? ;)

Kevin