One of my dad’s early computers, with the small screen, allowed you to scroll the screen around to view the content. This was, as it turns out, also the difference between the Mac and the iPhone: the Mac originally had scrollable content, the iPhone had a scrollable screen. When the iPhone and iPad became more popular than the Mac, Apple changed the Mac scroll convention to match the iPhone. (This is mostly the direction and effect of the scroll bars and mouse).
One of my teaching strategies as a Middle School math teacher (before retirement) was to engage the kids in building and running a model railroad. Over the years it grew along the walls until it completely circled the large room. It was loads of fun and distinctly lowered the math anxiety threshold for a lot of students.
Folks who are interested in trains are often kind of spectrum-y. No brag, just fact. We developed this poster to put in our math classroom:
One of my teaching strategies as a Middle School math teacher (before retirement) was to engage the kids in building and running a model railroad. Over the years it grew along the walls until it completely circled the large room. It was loads of fun and distinctly lowered the math anxiety threshold for a lot of students.
Folks who are interested in trains are often kind of spectrum-y. No brag, just fact. We developed this poster to put in our math classroom:
Mandarin doesn’t have “was,” to my understanding. It’s implied by context or time words. I don’t think Indonesian has “to be.” And there are other languages like this.
Not quite the same thing, but Latin had no articles and no words for “yes” and “no”.
Especially ironic, considering how essential articles are to the modern Romance languages.
At the risk of revealing how ancient and decrepit I am, there are two things I remember about the windows GUI. One was being able to visit Xerox PARC sometimes in the magical mid-70s, where the Alto (basically the first real PC), the windows GUI, Ethernet, laser printers, and file and name servers and all the other things we take for granted were first developed. I was hardly more than a kid at the time, but my older brother had a kind of courtesy position at PARC due to his work at the nearby Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), and gave me the grand tour which I found eye-popping.
The other thing I remember is some conference presenter around that time describing why the windows paradigm was important. It was much like what you described, but his particular analogy was to imagine being at your desk in an office, and trying to get typical office work done. What you probably have is papers all over your desk, some overlapping others, and you shuffle through them getting the information you need and maybe making notes in yet another document.
Now imagine if all you had to work with was 24 lines of text that were constantly scrolling up a screen! The idea is that a variety of overlapping windows, and the ability to minimize or close some and open others, is a pretty good simulation of documents on an office desktop, and certainly an immeasurably better one than a dumb character-mode terminal. Indeed we have come to refer to the screen of any generic windows-based computer as a “desktop”.
That’s just making me hungry
Somebody has to say it - although I was an “early adopter” of the Lisa and the Mac because of the new and improved GUI, it actually took a while before the folks who had learned to be highly productive in a character-based environment could wring the same level of productivity out of the new GUI. Many of you were probably WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 pros and remember how lightning fast the screen response times were.
In fact the first versions of MS Windows were character-based and were MUCH faster than the subsequent screen-draw versions, at least for a while.
I worked at Autodesk on the AutoCAD team during the transition from the DOS versions to the Windows versions. The installed base (who were hard core, full time keyboard jockeys) really couldn’t generate drawings as quickly using click-and-drag as they could by typing furiously, and until the new tools matured considerably they were right, it was a step backwards for them.
Eventually processors improved enough to erase the performance penalty of the windowing interface, and AutoCAD implemented features that exploited the advantages of mouse-based drawing. And the world has never looked back (well, except when we bring up our Console).
There’s always going to be some oddball situation, even today, where character-mode is better. And if windows takes a performance hit, that makes it even more compelling. But I find it hard to fathom any situation where character-mode is better that is not dedicated to a single task; the power of windows is in multi-tasking and a consistent object-oriented interface to all applications (well, at least in theory – Microsoft has been moving away from consistency for a long time).
But I still use sometimes use character-mode interactions in a Windows environment (via command prompt) because you can do things in a command prompt environment that are either difficult in the Windows paradigm or just outright impossible. There’s actually an elegance to the character mode interface, made all the more convenient by the ability to automate frequently used functions in batch scripts, so you don’t have to remember some application’s obscure commands and switches.
And the character-mode text editor TECO – familiar to all old-time users of DEC computers – is still IMHO the most capable text editor in existence, because it’s not so much a text editor as a specialized programming language in its own right, optimized for text editing. There’s a version that runs in Windows as a character-mode application..
I didn’t know there was a crowd that could out-Emacs the Emacs crowd.
Interestingly, EMACS shares a common history with TECO, as it was originally written as a set of macros for TECO. TECO purists would scoff at the need for that, since TECO inherently could do anything related to text manipulation.
The issue with TECO that drove some developers to create alternate editors was that its powerful capabilities were all contained within either single-letter or two-letter codes, the meaning of which was as natural to TECO aficionados as the simplest English, but which looked like total gibberish to the uninitiated.
It truly is like being at an indie record store or craft brewing festival, except for text editors.
Did they take out the keyboard commands for the earliest Windows versions? Because modern AutoCAD can be used entirely using the keyboard, too, and the most efficient way to use it is still mostly keyboard.
Oh, how well I remember the keyboard overlays for that program. And they had a driver for damn near every printer that was available. That software worked.
No, it was very clear that doing anything to inhibit the productivity of the installed base was not going to fly. But there was ongoing angst about the possibility! The documentation inflated spectacularly as a result of maintaining both methods.
Huh … vi FTW!! 
But, being English, he would have pronounced it the same as “sell a daw.” (A daw is a sort of bird.)
There used to be a craze for wouldbe humorous “dialect” books full of that sort of thing. I remember Prof. Afferbeck Lauder on Strine, featuring your Gloria Soame. When I lived in Stoke on Trent, there was also Arfer Towcrate in Staffycher.