Re: [Thinkpad] Antiques

mje@foxall.com.au wrote:
> Some of these old programs were ingeniously designed, and (being both a
> touch-typist and pianist) I could almost play some of them like a piano, and
> there was not a mouse in sight (or, if in sight, very much an optional alternative).

This raises an interesting point. I also date back to the pre-mice days, having cut my teeth on a PDP-8L with 8KB (yes kids, eight kilobytes) of real ferrite core memory and an ASR-33 Teletype with a paper tape reader. My first introduction to laptops was when my employer provided me with a TP760EL some years later. (Man I loved that 760.) But having grown up with nothing but keyboards, I still find myself doing as much as possible by means of keyboard shortcuts, only using the mouse occasionally.

My wife, on the other hand, is a child of the mouse generation and would be completely lost without her mouse or touchpad. I actually find it frustrating to watch her sometimes, clicking on every individual field in a form, then clicking on OK when she's done, when hitting Tab and Enter would have achieved the same results in a fraction of the time.

And editing. I need to change a block of text: cursor-up/down/ctrl-left/ctrl-right to reach it, ctrl-shift-arrow to select it, then type the replacement text or insert from the clipboard with shift-ins. She on the other hand, has to reach for that damned rodent, carefully select the text, and then click edit-paste if she wants to insert from the clipboard.

I wonder at what point people became reliant on pointing devices to that extent.

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Received on Fri Mar 31 16:50:31 2006