13 February 2012

A software demotivator

That one really warmed my heart's cockles, I have to admit, as it would undoubtedly do for any software development veteran. Click to enlarge only if you read Russian, otherwise proceed to the translation.

One of the examples of a bulky and, in the authors' opinion, useless upper layer, is the integrated system Windows by the Microsoft company. This system occupies almost 1 MB of the disk memory and is designed to be used mostly with a device called "mouse"...

... Obviously the reader has already understood that among the additional layers over DOS there are some useless systems, only looking good, but in reality only wasting user's time, disk memory and the computer's operational memory. The deceptive beauty of such systems, however, has a strong influence on an unsophisticated users without computer experience.

The mental inertia, in the author's experience, could be so strong that the people who started with using one of such systems, could be hardly forced to learn DOS commands afterward. We'd like to forewarn our readers against making this mistake.

[List of three authors]

"Personal Computers in Engineering Practice", 1992

4 comments:

Francis Sedgemore said...

And there are those Linux geeks, even today, who regard X has the spawn of the devil. TTY or die, they cry.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

 Yeah, I don't know whether you are familiar with VI editor. Same story with Unix geeks.

Francis Sedgemore said...

I've been using vi (more lately vim) since I was a lad in short trousers. I even use it today on my ThinkPad laptop running Windows 7 (Cygwin). I am, or was, a Unix geek, but I also appreciate good software design. In that respect vi fits the bill as a power tool. Good software design, and regard for the human-computer interface, is why I favoured OS X until Apple dropped the ball following Snow Leopard.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

 He he... the truth will get out. I spent quite some time giggling at the VI nerds...