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Aucbvax.2426 fa.works utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works Fri Jul 24 00:06:07 1981 Collected responses on useable systems >From JMTURN@MIT-AI Fri Jul 24 00:03:46 1981 ------------------------------

Date: 23 July 1981 16:29-EDT From: Steven H. Gutfreund <SHG AT MIT-AI> Subject: mundane To: Joe.Newcomer at CMU-10A

Joe Newcomer raises a very good point in his letter of July-22:

I find that I have less and less time to worry about, say, how to make CR in EMACS behave like LF and how to stop LF from behaving differently if the previous line started at the left margin. I know what effect I want; I don't want to know about 37 different variables, TECO FS-flags, and other crap to get a simple change in behavior. This is a lot of what is involved in getting really good personal workstations; if I have to remember dozens of incantations to, say, set up defaults when I boot, I'm not going to be very happy.

joe

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Peter Keene (sp?) of MIT Sloan School has a nice way of describing the sort of system behavior Joe is looking for: mundane.

If I am not a car wizard I want my car's behavior to be mundane. I want my car to be boring, I don't want it doing interesing things like losing wheels. Many car drivers also don't want to learn all the exciting things that you can do with manual transmission, boring old automatic transmissions are good enough to get where you are going.

If I am not a phone wizard I want my phone to be mundane. I am not particularly interested in the intimate details of the phone billing system when I am complaining about a $7,000 phone bill, I really wanted the phone company to do the boring old thing and bill me my normal ammount.

I believe that most people will want their workstations to be mundane. They probably won't want a 3 week training course to learn all sorts of wizzy neat features. If it behaves mostly like those boring old office equipment (typewriters, phones, etc.) it will probably be enough. After all, most people will be using the workstation as a tool to get their work (what they find interesting enough to be paid for) done.

- Steven Gutfreund

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Date: 23 July 1981 04:17-EDT From: James M. Turner <JMTURN AT MIT-AI> Subject: Various subspecies To: Joe.Newcomer at CMU-10A

Shade and Sweet water,

But designing systems who's most inexperienced user is it's lowest common denominator severely limits what can be built in to the language.

As an example, I am currently involved in moving Scribe to the Lisp Machine (albeit, in a greatly changed appearence). A decision that was made very early was that although the DOCUMENT (the Scribe input file) requires no specialized knowledge to write, extensions to the system itself require a working understanding of Lisp, and the way Scribe works in this version. The idea behind this was that if we tried to create a "secretary extensible" environment, we would be sacrificing efficiency (important in a package which is already dangerously slow due to LISPM <-> PDP-10 I/O speed) and clarity of code for the benefit of people who would probably not wish to change the code anyway.

Besides, the typical supervisor doesn't want "low level" personnel fooling with the code anyway. A friend who is currently doing DE for DEC related the story to me of how her supervisor had flamed when she had poked around the OS trying to find out how to logout (it seems SOP was to hang up, which she could not accept).

James

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End of collected responses on useable systems *********************************************

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