Re: Minimalism

[Wayne Douglass <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM>]

At 04:50 PM 7/9/97 -0700, Jim Purcell wrote:
>Lesson one, entering text: "A word processor is kind of like a
>typewriter. Take a business letter or document you are working on right
>now and type it into the document window." Lesson two, formatting text:
>"Actually, a word processor does more than a typewriter. For instance,
>you can change the format of selected text. Drag the mouse over some
>text to select it. Choose various options on the Format menu and see
>what happens."
>
>The idea is that by using examples that are real to the trainee and by
>encouraging guided exploration of the product, tasks and concepts become
>more firmly fixed in the user's mind. These are training goals, not
>documentation goals.
>
This is my understanding of minimalism, too.

In fact, I am reminded of my "training" in my first job in this business (an
ex-academic, I had *zero* computer background). I was given the reference
manual for the system (this was in the bad old days of command line
interfaces - wait a minute, isn't there something called UNIX that's *still*
like that?) with the most useful commands checked and told to figure out for
myself what happens. The text editor (sort of like the DOS editor) was part
of the manual. The text formatting program (bad old embedded commands - not
WYSIWYG) was a separate book. I was given two weeks and left mostly alone. I
typed in some text from a newspaper article about the Pope, saved the file,
and went on from there (the results when I issued some blanket change
commands replacing "Pope" with "Vicar of Christ on earth" kept me
entertained). It worked for me.

--Wayne
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Wayne Douglass        phone: 408-542-2139
Verity, Inc.            FAX: 408-542-2040
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