People might have that misconception due to hearing about the Apollo flight and guidance computers, which were pretty janky. They had a really difficult to use interface, and used core-rope memory[1] that was woven together by old ladies.
I'm sick of people slamming old tech with 50 years of hindsight. They were the smartest people in the world doing the best work they could with what they had available to them. And that's what they came up with - and it got the job done.
Edit: The compile times for core-rope memory were pretty long, so there were lots and lots of simulations. Going to core was an infrequent occurrence. The computers had a small amount of conventional core so that patches could be applied. Bug fixes half way to the moon were possible.
AFAIK their Noun-Verb keyboard interface was deemed quite novel and particularly easy to use at the time.
normally I don't post this sort of thing on HN, but LMFAO.