Read Online In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Neal Stephenson
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expensive and partly because ordinary people can only learn so much. If the VCR had been invented a hundred years ago, it would have come with a thumb-wheel to adjust the tracking and a gearshift to change between forward and reverse, and a big cast-iron handle to load or to eject the cassettes. It would have had a big analog clock on the front of it, and you would have set the time by moving the hands around on the dial. But because the VCR was invented when it was—during asort of awkward transitional period between the era of mechanical interfaces and GUIs—it just had a bunch of pushbuttons on the front, and in order to set the time you had to push the buttons in just the right way. This must have seemed reasonable enough to the engineers responsible for it, but to many users it was simply impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that appears on so many VCRs. Computer people call this “the blinking twelve problem.” When they talk about it, though, they usually aren’t talking about VCRs.
Modern VCRs usually have some kind of on-screen programming, which means that you can set the time and control other features through a sort of primitive GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of course, but they also have other types of virtual controls, like radio buttons, checkboxes, text entry boxes, dials, and scrollbars. Interfaces made out of these components seem to be a lot easier, for many people, than pushing those little buttons on the front of the machine, and so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly disappearing from America’s living rooms. The blinking twelve problem has moved on to plague other technologies.
So the GUI has gone beyond being an interface to personal computers, and has become a sort of meta-interface that is pressed into service for every new piece of consumer technology. It is rarely an ideal fit, but having an ideal, or even a good, interface is no longer the priority; the important thing now is having some kind of interface that customers will actually use, so that manufacturerscan claim, with a straight face, that they are offering new features.
We want GUIs largely because they are convenient and because they are easy—or at least the GUI makes it seem that way. Of course, nothing is really easy and simple, and putting a nice interface on top of it does not change that fact. A car controlled through a GUI would be easier to drive than one controlled through pedals and steering wheel, but it would be incredibly dangerous.
By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: “The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books.” As long as we stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies, we inevitably run into the problem of:
METAPHOR SHEAR
I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than its competition. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out, I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.
Sometime in the mid-1990s I attempted to open one of my old,
Modern VCRs usually have some kind of on-screen programming, which means that you can set the time and control other features through a sort of primitive GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of course, but they also have other types of virtual controls, like radio buttons, checkboxes, text entry boxes, dials, and scrollbars. Interfaces made out of these components seem to be a lot easier, for many people, than pushing those little buttons on the front of the machine, and so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly disappearing from America’s living rooms. The blinking twelve problem has moved on to plague other technologies.
So the GUI has gone beyond being an interface to personal computers, and has become a sort of meta-interface that is pressed into service for every new piece of consumer technology. It is rarely an ideal fit, but having an ideal, or even a good, interface is no longer the priority; the important thing now is having some kind of interface that customers will actually use, so that manufacturerscan claim, with a straight face, that they are offering new features.
We want GUIs largely because they are convenient and because they are easy—or at least the GUI makes it seem that way. Of course, nothing is really easy and simple, and putting a nice interface on top of it does not change that fact. A car controlled through a GUI would be easier to drive than one controlled through pedals and steering wheel, but it would be incredibly dangerous.
By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: “The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books.” As long as we stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies, we inevitably run into the problem of:
METAPHOR SHEAR
I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than its competition. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out, I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.
Sometime in the mid-1990s I attempted to open one of my old,
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