I was alive in 1983. I've used computers from that era, and I've used lots of point-of-sale and 3270 interfaces, because I came to software engineering by a route that involved a goodly number of menial day jobs early on. If you had an MBNA credit card and called customer service about it between early 2000 and mid-2001, you might have talked to me, and I probably waived your goddam late fee because that was policy to keep generally on-time-paying customers feeling good about the company.
The author of that thread is exactly right, and also kind of wrong.
They're exactly right that modern interfaces, web ones most especially, suck super bad. (I'm a web dev, I'm not disclaiming responsibility here.)
They're kind of wrong in that modern interfaces are built over enormously more complex datasets and problem domains than those to which they compare them. I mean, yeah, a Wyse-50 in a library was fast as hell at what it could do, but try getting it to show you a map, like, at all. I'm not even sure those things were character-addressable, so, good luck with that!
UI design as a concept doesn't get enough love in our very young industry. It's as complex, difficult, and necessary a discipline as software engineering, but we mostly just have software engineers build UI as an afterthought and if it sucks, oh well, so does everyone else's, and it doesn't obviously drive revenue anyway. I blame capitalism.
The author of that thread is exactly right, and also kind of wrong.
They're exactly right that modern interfaces, web ones most especially, suck super bad. (I'm a web dev, I'm not disclaiming responsibility here.)
They're kind of wrong in that modern interfaces are built over enormously more complex datasets and problem domains than those to which they compare them. I mean, yeah, a Wyse-50 in a library was fast as hell at what it could do, but try getting it to show you a map, like, at all. I'm not even sure those things were character-addressable, so, good luck with that!
UI design as a concept doesn't get enough love in our very young industry. It's as complex, difficult, and necessary a discipline as software engineering, but we mostly just have software engineers build UI as an afterthought and if it sucks, oh well, so does everyone else's, and it doesn't obviously drive revenue anyway. I blame capitalism.