Blast from the Past: Mousing Around

When I started working at the computer labs at UCSB I taught some intro classes to faculty and staff. We literally started with "this is the mouse, and the tail always points away from you." It was amazing how many people would have the mouse turned sideways or even backwards and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't move the pointer the right way.

Haha, cool! I actually wrote a detailed mail to the OS X engineers telling them about this (you know they're all NeXT-heads and don't know the old Mac stuff), and how we needed a version of this (obviously gratly updated) for OS X. When OS X got here, I had a lot of trouble understanding user folder, and why it wasn't okay to put all my working files in the root directory anymore, and a "Meet the Mac" application that would tell us this stuff -- with modes for "coming from OS 9" and "coming from Windows" -- would have been great. But they didn't agree with me. Thanks for nothin', Apple.

I was thinking about the Mac learning programs this weekend while I was playing Wii Play. I realized that the game, a pack of 9 mini-games, is really just a tool for learning how to use the Wii Remote. The cycle repeats.

What ever happened to HyperCard ;-)

I remember the early days. There was a Mac on display at the Robinson's in Beverly Hills. A woman saw the instruction to use the mouse to point to objects and click. She picked it up off the table and used like a TV remote, pointing it at the screen and pressing the mouse button.

She never did get the channel to change.

I've always really liked that face thing. Is it the Finder? Anyway, that's one of the things I first really liked about the Mac before I switched.

I remember this tutorial when it was new and it came with my Mac.

Yeah, I remember those days, I showed that mouse instructional program to lots of people. Many of them didn't get it until I told them to think of their index finger on the mouse as being "up" and to not think about the mouse, think about where they were pointing with their finger. The brand new Microsoft two-button mouse was considerably more difficult for customers to conceptualize.

Even today, I just recently attempted to teach my mom so that she can email me and browse the internet, something she's really looking forward to doing. I was amazed at how much trouble she had with the mouse, which she tried to move diagonally for some reason. We take so many things for granted, but not everybody knows.

Sadly, I work with a couple people who might benefit from this tutorial. OK, not really, but they're not far off.