Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rudedog who wrote (21766)	11/25/1998 9:49:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Of course I agree with the general premise. There will at some point be a new interface. Gesture, artifact, posture and voice based with situational AI support is my guess - and I have some design ideas on paper for that, although, y'know preliminary is an understatement. I do think it will be a while. I believe that Arthur C Clark's maxim can be applied here - the one that says any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic. To which one might add, any technology of fair complexity that you do not understand the internals of. I think you can take this a step further. I believe that the magic of our stories and movies is exactly the user interface and personal power projection mode we want. We had dreams of flying for millennia before we could fly, but we eventually made it happen, and as time has gone on we have made it seem ever more personally powered - hang gliding for instance. So I believe that we (without much conscious thought needed about it) will drift ever closer to the metaphor for control provided by our ideas of how magic operates. I believe this has it's roots in our earliest experiences in operating our bodies and discovering things like our toes. To a baby, the idea that you can direct an arm and fingers to grasp objects is like control of the world by sheer will power. I believe that is the wonderful control experience we would like to have again. I also think other control metaphors will arise. NLP and other branches of psychology state that different people like to experience, control, and make metaphors about the world through different senses and modalities - speech, visceral, and so on. So eventually the interface will become particularized to individual needs and that particularity will involve differences that would astound the one-size-fits-all interface designer of today. Chaz >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> PS A couple of quibbles. First, only Microsoft and IBM had no GUI system by the mid-1980s. My foggy recollection of some dates: The Star was in the 1970's, the basic research for it in the 1960's, original X developed in the late 1970s and early 1980's, the Lisa around 1980, the Mac by 1983 or 1984, the Amiga by 1985 or so, ditto for Atari. Everyone except MSFT and IBM had a GUI available for their major platform by 1985. Actually, they had them too by 1984, they just didn't work right for another decade. Moreover, many application programs used the core idea of the gui, the interactive consistent user environment, way before then - turbo pascal and some word processing programs and spreadsheets, for instance. In this connection I want to note that except for icons and the usual need for a mouse the IE is the idea that was seminal - menu bars, feature lists, sizeable windows, etc - all things that emacs and brief and many other programs used a long time ago. How an IE worked was pretty standardized by the 1970s. And that was most of the battle. The rest was getting enough spare machine and graphics power to use icons and mice for what you had done from the IDE before that, and working out the details of the control systems. Of course that is from the system designer point of view and not the user experience POV, except for those who use Windows as a key controlled interactive environment, not caring for the mouse as some don't. The GUI was not popularized by MSFT. That Windows finally came together about 6 years ago and so the majority cheap PC user finally had an OS GUI from the OS vendor is not a persuasive reason to use 5 years ago as a start date for me. Rather, it is a good example of how MSFT only gets dragged into new technology the hard way. And how new technology starts out sometimes at the level of the high-dollar user and drifts down. Or comes from the small competitor, which is why we need competition. I would bet that between the Mac, with 12% market share in the late 1980s, original X, Sun OS, Atari, Amiga, and various others, probably 20-30% of all non-IBM-mainframe computer users used a GUI at least part of the time by 1986. By that time I was using a GUI terminal window even to access mainframe text sessions. I had used various graphics and video editing programs, all of which used GUIs as well, before that time. But just look at the fact that anyone who had a workstation (Sun, etc) or a Mac or an Amiga had a GUI by the early 1980s. They were very popular, using a definition of popularity that does not involve majority. A majority of people doing something is an end-game state. Cheers, Chaz