Geoff Duncan

So last evening Larry Tesler gave a talk to the Puget Sound chapter of the ACM's SIGCHI. (The ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, a long-standing professional organization for tech people; SIG CHI stands for Special Interest Group and Computer-Human Interaction. Disclaimer: I'm not a joiner, but I know lots of these people and host their mailing lists.)

Anyway: Tesler was at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s, and one of the folks who helped develop many of the computer interface conventions which most people take for granted today; he was also at Apple for 17 years, eventually serving as Chief Scientist before The Return of Steve Jobs, overseeing the Advanced Technology Group. Tesler takes credit for things he did, but also likes to give credit to others and note that, even if he thinks he might have been the first to do something, he might be wrong. Things like icons (initially proposed in a 1973 memo he co-authored at PARC), mouse selection heuristics which allow for some "slop" selecting lines and placing insertion points, Apple's one-button mouse and scrollbar design, the OK and Cancel buttons in Mac alert dialogs (borrowed from early ATM machines), etc. I remember Tesler's SmallTalk class browser from a journey to the University of Nevada-Reno's computer lab when I was in elementary school: I wanted to know how to get to things which weren't in the list, a predilection which probably still frustrates me today in Mac OS X Finder's little-improved Column View.

Two things most interested me: Tesler's discussion of modeless text selection and editing, which he initially implemented at PARC in the text editor Gypsy. (The ideas later migrated to the Mac.) The second was his long obsession with "invisible characters" in text editors - tabs, carriage returns, line feeds, etc. - which can be so confusing, especially for non-technical users. For my money, while text editors and word processors these days are somewhat consistent in their modelessness during editing, none handle invisible characters very well (a "Show Invisible Characters" command is supremely ironic). But worse, I kinda got the sense that even Tesler feels the industry has moved on from these issues. Users are more sophisticated now, can handle multiple-button mice, more complicated interfaces, etc. While that may be true at companies like Apple and Amazon (Tesler's current employer) my gut instinct is that computers are still far too confusing, complicated, and counter-intuitive.

I mean, if computers made sense, people like me wouldn't exist.