from the November 1982 issue of Byte magazine

by Phil Lemmons

Keyboards are meant to let our fingers do the talking, but more often they make us swear aloud. Every manufacturer seems to want its keyboard to be unmistakably different from any other. The only keys that seem to be sacred and immovable are badly placed: the familiar QWERTYUIOP and its companion rows of the alphabet. The Shift and Return keys occasionally stray, and the control keys and function keys wander from one end of the keyboard to the other. Perhaps most puzzling of all, the placement of the cursor keys is not yet standardized in the most logical configuration, with the “up” key above, the “down” key below, the “left” key at the left, and the “right” key at the right. Let’s hope that Chris Rutkowski’s efforts to organize the placement of the most common control functions in sensible groupings will be a major step toward standardization.

from the November 1985 issue of MicroTimes magazine

Jef Raskin believes that computers should be easy to use. How easy? Well, he calls his company Information Appliance, and favors computers as hassle-free as toasters.

By contrast, Raskin says, the current state of the industry more closely resembles a scenario conjured up by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame). “Adams was describing some imaginary product of the future, and he said that people get such a sense of achievement from having mastered it that they forget how useless it is. I think that’s really a key problem in the industry today — a person works on the computer and they get all this mastery, and they just forget all the little gut-wrenching annoyances they went through when they used it first.”