“Verity Stob” began writing about technology issues three decades back. She reminisces about some things that have changed and others that are still irritatingly the same:
It’s 30 years since .EXE Magazine carried the first Stob column; this is its
pearlPerl anniversary. Rereading article #1, a spoof self-tester in the Cosmo style, I was struck by how distant the world it invoked seemed. For example:
Your program requires a disk to have been put in the floppy drive, but it hasn’t. What happens next?
The original answers, such as:
e) the program crashes out into DOS, leaving dozens of files open
would now need to be supplemented by
f) what’s ‘the floppy drive’ already, Grandma? And while you’re at it, what is DOS? Part of some sort of DOS and DON’TS list?
I say: sufficient excuse to present some Then and Now comparisons with those primordial days of programming, to show how much things have changed – or not.
1988: Drag-and-drop was a showy-offy but not-quite-satisfactory technology.
My first DnD encounter was by proxy. In about 1985 my then boss, a wise and cynical old Brummie engineer, attended a promotional demo, free wine and nibbles, of an exciting new WIMP technology called GEM. Part of the demo was to demonstrate the use of the on-screen trash icon for deleting files.
According to Graham’s gleeful report, he stuck up his hand at this point. “What happens if you drag the clock into the wastepaper basket?’
The answer turned out to be: the machine crashed hard on its arse, and it needed about 10 minutes embarrassed fiddling to coax it back onto its feet. At which point Graham’s arm went up again. “What happens if you drop the wastepaper basket into the clock?’
Drag-ons ‘n’ drag-offs
GEM may have been primitive, but it was at least consistent.
The point became moot a few months later, when Apple won a look-and-feel lawsuit and banned the GEM trashcan outright.
2018: Not that much has changed. Windows Explorer users: how often has your mouse finger proved insufficiently strong to grasp the file? And you have accidentally dropped the document you wanted into a deep thicket of nested server directories?
Or how about touch interface DnD on a phone, where your skimming pinkie exactly masks from view the dragged thing?
Well then.
However, I do confess admiration for this JavaScript library that aims to make a dragging and dropping accessible to the blind. Can’t fault its ambition.
