Re: SEUL: SOTs comments

[Graydon Hoare <graydon@pandect.com>]

On Thu, 4 Sep 1997, Paul Anderson wrote:

[ flurryous verbiage removed ]

> understand in Win95, they understand it on Macs.  I have *NEVER* in all
> the time I've been repairing computers heard of someone calling tech
> support in capable of understanding directories.  Why, may I ask, is it so

I'm not going to respond to the rest of your shouting because other people
have already clarified (in a calm, civilized manner) that we'd need a more
plan-9'ish filesystem to accomplish sufficient hiding.

However, in response to your claim above: when I worked in a phone support
center, there was a large number of callers who were incapable of
understanding directories. So far as they were concerned, the open/close
dialog boxes showed them a view of all the files they had worked on, and
the remainder of the filesystem they were unaware of the existence of. 
Programs were not considered a type of file. Programs appear in the
program manager or start bar. Files in the open/close dialog. get it?

They consistently had trouble dragging and dropping, copying, deleting,
renaming, and (especially) nesting directories and files.

Even "knowledgable" users we supported (those who could download a file
and put it somewhere) regularly kept everything in a single-level
directory hierarchy -- one directory under C: for each major application,
game, person, or project they were working on. 

Most office users we supported were unable to distinguish between shared
network drives and local drives, and thus resorted to emailing useful
items around inside their company (including programs).

Furthermore, a large chunk of our callers were unaware that more than one
program could be executed simultaneously, and the agents quickly came to
understand that encouraging these users to try multitasking was much worse
because they were incapable of switching between programs or reusing a
copy of a program already in use (i.e. they would run a new copy of a
program to edit a different file, leaving the old one running, thus
eventually crashing the machine).

Never underestimate the number of mistakes you made as a kid, learning to
use computers. And you actually _cared_ about how it works. Most end-users
are not only oblivious, but also angry that technicians think they should
care. 

-graydon <graydon@pobox.com>