Word Processors and GUIs

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

This is largely a matter of personal preference (i.e., religious), but I'll
say why I think Wm. Geiger's claims are unconvincing.

At 9:58 PM -0700 12/29/97, William H. Geiger III wrote:

>Lets see how many years before winblows were there computers??
>
>It may be hard to believe for some of the "youngsters" on the list but
>people got quite a bit of work done before the fancy GUI's and the ever
>insistent push to "upgrade" every six months by Micky$loth.

The real boom in productivity has to do with users not having to memorize
various command sequences for various programs.

What the Macintosh made popular (though I won't get into the dangerous
ground of saying it pioneered these ideas--see Note below) was the approach
of having a relatively consistent set of commands across many applications.
And with the commands visible in a menu bar.

(Note: The Symbolics and Xerox Lisp/Smalltalk machines I used in the early
80s had similar features, with pop-up menus of commonly used commands. And,
of course, with even heavier use of object-oriented methodologies than the
Mac could afford to include. The idea of a unified, integrated environment
is an old one, going back at least to Doug Engelbart in the 60s, and
perhaps even further back. And the Bobrow book, "Design of Interactive
Programming Environments," laid out most of the features we now call "GUI."
Or some people call "GUI.")

The effect of this all is profound. It means that a manager or secretary or
whatever doesn't need to write down a bunch of funny commands for Wordstar,
or Emacs, or Autocad...he or she can "muddle through" just by going to the
"File" menu item to open files, save them, make copies, etc. Or to the
"Edit" menu item to make changes, cut and paste, alter fonts, whatever.

Specialists in some particular program of course become proficient even
without a GUI or Menu-based system. But of course most GUI programs (Mac,
of course, and Windows, and most Unices) offer various keyboard shortcuts.

Maybe Wm. Geiger and others dismiss GUI or Menu interfaces as "training
wheels." Perhaps. But it's very useful to have such aids when dealing with
5 or 10 or 30 different programs!

(I started out on a Data General Nova, got a Proc Tech Sol as my first PC,
then a VAX, then an IBM PC, then a Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine, then a Mac,
and so on. With my PC, moving from one program to another was always
painful, and I had various keyboard overlays (remember those?) to help me
transition from the "Cmd-Shift-Backspace" to select a word in BlueWord
1.00A to "Shift-Doubleclick" to do the same thing in SpreadSheet 1.5. Once
I got my Macintosh, this all ended. No more keyboard overlays...they
weren't needed.)

>A well train and experienced secretary will be much more productive with a
>text-mode WP with a good set of macro's and keyboard accelerators. A mouse
>and a GUI is not only unnecessary but counter-productive.

Which of course explains why corporations are not using Windows or Macs!

I disagree strongly that any corporation is more productive, overall, with
such tools. Granted, a fast typist equipped with some special purpose text
entry system (we used to have Laniers and Wangs as our "secretary
engines"), but that typist will not be constrained by typing in a GUI
window!

But of course most companies, especially larger high tech companies, don't
even have secretaries to type and retype letters, memos, and reports.
Engineers, and even managers, and even very senior managers, type most of
their own stuff these days. (Or so all my friends in Silicon Valley assure
me.)

I started typing all my own technical papers into my own IBM PC back in
'83, using the first version of Microsoft Word. While it is true that I was
being paid to be a scientist, and not a typist, it was far faster for me to
write the papers on my PC, edit them, and so on, than to submit a longhand
(arghh!) copy to a secretary, finagle to get her to work on it, get it back
several days later, find numerous errors I had not put there, and even
missing sentences and paragraphs. And so on.

This experience of mine has been repeated millions of times in corporate
America. Even my old boss, Andy Grove, now types all of his correspondence,
which is now mostly e-mail. Or so he claims.

In this environment, where people at all levels are using multiple
programs--e-mail, word processing, drawing, spreadsheets, math programs,
graphing programs, Web browsers, and so on--it is much more efficient to
have an integrated environment, a common set of basic commands, a GUI.


>I would take a good multi-threaded, multi-tasking, text mode system over
>the drivile that keeps comming out of Redmond, WA. anyday.

I think the quality of lack of quality of word processors is grossly
overrated.

Most features are not used in ordinary writing. I write a *lot* of stuff,
and 99% of what I write is completely nondependent on bells and whistles in
most word processing programs.

(I could digress into discussing writing features I like to use for some
projects, such as MORE's outlining features, or page layout features I use
in FrameMaker. But 99% of my writing is now done for e-mail like this,
using the straightforward text tools of Eudora Pro.)

Most writing is done "typewriter style," with the ability to move words
around just lagniappe.  (And often dangerous lagniappe at that...most
errors creep in when people move words and sentences around, often leaving
them mismatching their surroundings in tense and awkwardly linking to often
leaving them mismatching often leaving them mismatching...see what I mean?)

Good writing comes from good writers, not from word processing programs.
Those who can't put a decent argument together will not find solace in some
"good multi-threaded, multi-tasking, text mode system."

--Tim May

The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
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