Thirty Years with Computers

Monday, May 31st, 2004

In Thirty Years with Computers, Jakob Nielsen makes the usual points — and a few points only a usuability expert would make:

I started using computers in 1974, when I was still in high school. My first computer took up an entire room and yet had only five kilobytes of RAM.

Punched paper tape was the main form of data input, and the operator console was an electric typewriter. No screens, no cursor. The CPU (central processing unit) ran at a speed of about 0.1MHz.

Despite its primitive nature, this early computer was much more pleasant to use than the monster mainframe I was subjected to a few years later, when I started at the university. The early, simple computer couldn’t do much, though I did design a few text-based games for it. Still, it was a single-user computer — basically a PC the size of a room. When you used it, you had total control of the machine and knew everything it did, down to the spinning and whirring of the punched tape.

Although the bigger, newer mainframe had an actual CRT (cathode ray tube) screen, it also had obscure commands and horrible usability. Worst of all, it was highly alienating, because you had no idea what was going on. You’d issue commands, and some time later, you might get the desired result. There was no feeling of mastery of the machine. You were basically a supplicant to a magic oracle functioning beyond the ken of humankind.

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