Thoughts on, and pictures of, the original Macintosh User Manual

(On the other hand, try using that Mac with only the keyboard, and you'll be disappointed at how much more difficult it is.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOgdFZD-N8k

Before arriving at this simple mistake I had got her to close the blinds in the room where my computer was setup. In those days mice were opto-mechanical with the ball, and, under extreme bright light the sensors in the mouse were vulnerable to light coming through the plastic housing of the mouse. Connections had been checked too, plus I had managed to get her to reboot the machine with the reset button on the front. Yet all along it was operator error, I imagined everything that could be wrong up to 'it must be a stray neutrino' levels of implausible yet I overlooked the idea that my mum intuitively thought that a computer mouse was like a real mouse with the 'tail at the back'.

We got there in the end after I had the eureka moment and worked out my mum was holding the mouse wrong. I could talk her through the rest when that was resolved and got the snippet of information I needed - a telephone number - which I needed for work.

It was only when ecommerce and the Amazon Kindle came along that my mother was finally able to use a computer. All difficulties and fears mysteriously vanished when it came to buying stuff online, she became perfectly adept at using a computer then, much to my father's amusement.

If only I had known of this tutorial back then.

He'd try over and over and over. Nipple on cheek. Nipple on chin. Nipple on neck. Drop bottle entirely. Nipple in eye. (Do not want!) And once in a great while, nipple in mouth. Then he'd suck for a while and start over again.

We learn so much that we forget even learning. If he could have talked and he'd asked me how to put something in his mouth, I couldn't really have told him. I just did it.

I think about that a lot when dealing with students, junior programmers, etc. It's so easy for me to think, "How could they not know that?!?" When the real question is how I managed to forget learning.

Also the most common.

My plea to everybody: user-test your documentation. Give the thing to a novice, have them do tasks, see if they can figure it out. If nobody looks at the docs, great, just throw them out. But if they do look, make sure it is useful to the person who is looking.

  // Increment frob
  frob++;

I write this from a Linux laptop, so obviously my preferences are different. But I recognize that I'm part of a relatively narrow niche. And I'll note that Apple is still making personal computers. If you include their phones (which I do) then they have hundreds of millions of daily users. Whereas IBM got out of the personal computer business long ago because they couldn't compete.

I used to teach computers in the early 1990s before Windows 3.1 was popular, and the main PC apps like Lotus 123 and WordPerfect were impossible to learn without the keyboard templates that had the key-presses printed in them you needed to do anything including edit, print and save. Each app had its own key presses and the publishers fiercely protected them to ensure competitors were NOT copying them. Then came the Mac and you learned to print in one app, you knew it for EVERY OTHER MAC APP.

At the time developers couldn’t understand why such functions (and appearance) were standardised and many considered it negatively, as in “Apple restricting my creativity and telling me what to do.”

Of course later the Mac started shipping with HyperCard which was an absolutely fantastic development environment for amateurs.