Reply to post: Back when hard disks were expensive extras ...

Back when hard disks were expensive extras ...

A customer complained that the hard disk didn't work. He knew it didn't work because file access hadn't got any faster. After a few minutes of confused conversation, I discovered that the files being accessed were on floppy disk. After a reasonably short explanation of copying files to the hard disk and accessing them from there, I had a contented customer (he was unhappy that this was not explained in the installation manual for the disk). The customer was not thick - explaining the solution went far more smoothly than I expected. He had read the manual, and it did not explain what a hard disk is, and that files have to be stored there for it to do anything useful.

The problem was the transition from computers being exclusively for techies to being a device used by computer illiterates whose illiteracy was far beyond the understanding of techies.

Now for the really difficult problems I have with computer illiterates:

1) Type date<enter>. Look at the number of seconds. Count to three. Look at the number of seconds. See that a terminal emulator shows a record of past interactions that are not updated. Demonstrate this every week for months. The user still complains that old contents of a terminal window are not up to date.

2) Two websites need to be updated with the same information. For the one I set up, user types one word<enter> and it is done - correctly every week. The other one I have no control over and uses wordpress. It requires about 30 seconds of typing/clicking, 3 minutes of waiting for the browser to update. One step is typing most of the file name and using tab completion to ensure it is typed correctly. The user will not use tab completion. The user types the file name wrong about one time in four. The shell says no such file, but she carries on regardless. The user looks at a blank text editor, realises something is wrong, and types shell commands into the editor expecting something to happen. (The file has to be damaged so wordpress can understand it, then she can use xclip to type it in). Has anyone successfully explained that typing shell commands into a text editor doesn't work?