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Showing posts from August, 2008

Folk Ergonomics: or, it all Fitts

When I was a poor civil servant ( plus ça change ) and part-time graduate student I longed to own a Mac. I’d read everything available about them, and nothing I read did anything to dissuade me. What I wanted, as well as the crisp, typographic display and the integration between the applications, was the windowing system. I already knew, somehow, that a Proper Computer™ would be able to show more than one program on the screen at once and let you move between them. Lacking the funds to buy the current model Apple was offering, a Mac SE, I made do with an Atari ST 520 STFM. This was a strange machine with a dual personality:   a games machine with aspirations to being a workstation, and which used the non-broken version of Digital Research’s GEM windowing environment. This system had been shamelessly copied from the Mac interface, so much so that Apple sued Digital Research and got an injunction that prevented later versions of GEM (used on DOS machines, notably those from Amstrad) fr