AT THE Vanguard Computing Center – in Washington, D. C, I watched a young woman present a machine with an extremely complex problem in ballistics involving hundreds of variables. At once lights on a control panel twinkled and winked as the computer checked to see that all equipment was operating properly. Then it set briskly to work. Magnetic tapes spun in their shiny glass-and-steel vacuum cabinets, the high-speed printer muttered. Suddenly the machine stopped and the electric typewriter wrote: “Last entry improperly stated!”

A little embarrassed, the young operator corrected her error, and the machine started again. Four minutes later it gave an answer that had required several million individual calculations.

“This is a wonderful machine” the girl said, “but it makes you shiver sometimes, especially when you give it a wrong figure. Once in a while we give it an incorrect figure on purpose—just to see it sneer at us.”

– THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER (Oct, 1958)

I’d never discourage anyone from making the most fun error messages and interactions possible. But when being sneered at by the machine gives operators more of a connection to it than using it normally, I think something is broken. I can’t imagine that fostering a healthy operator-machine relationship. Honestly though, I don’t know that it’s worse than the same boring regular interactions, but with boring error messages instead.

In the early 1950’s, we took a hard look at the future for business computer systems.

Our best estimate, at the time, was a potential of 50 new customers.

–IBM Advertisement From the 1980′s (via Modern Mechanix)