> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of > William T Goodall > Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 8:33 AM > To: Brin-L > Subject: Apple invented the mouse > > > ...as we knew it for nearly two decades. The universal design of a > rubber-coated ball-bearing, orthogonal pinch rollers, and optical disk > encoders was developed by Apple for the Lisa and Macintosh projects and > has little resemblance to Englebart's mouse, or the Xerox mouse.
Even if this is true in some sense, it is hardly the point of a mouse, which I suspect the vast majority of people, including far too many UI "experts," don't understand. The mouse was invented by cognitive scientists who knew that that when we do things that require physical movement, we learn and remember better. For example, the typical person who types "mv foo.txt /homes/billybob/work/bar" to move a file into a different directory is *far* less likely to remember where they put it than the person who drags the icon for that file into the icon for that directory. Similarly, those who organize their directories by rearranging icons on a screen are far more likely to recall that structure than those who do it with command line instructions. The ideas behind the GUI have to do with "kinetic memory" or "motor memory," as well as our brains' great ability to remember things spatially. My friend (who has discussed this stuff with Doug Englebart) just reminded me that before books were cheap, people memorized vast amounts of information by constructing spatial models -- "memory palaces," as the Jesuits called them. Unfortunately, a great many GUI features have been copied by people and companies who have no real understanding of *why* they were invented in the first place. Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
