{"id":337,"date":"2009-07-03T08:31:43","date_gmt":"2009-07-03T13:31:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/?p=337"},"modified":"2009-07-03T08:31:48","modified_gmt":"2009-07-03T13:31:48","slug":"thank-you-sir-may-i-have-another","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/03\/thank-you-sir-may-i-have-another\/","title":{"rendered":"Thank you sir, may I have another?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently by 1958, mankind’s subservient relationship with computers was sadly well established,<\/p>\n

\nAT 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: \u201cLast entry improperly stated!\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a wonderful machine\u201d the girl said, \u201cbut 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\u2014just to see it sneer at us.<\/span>\u201d
\n<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

— THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER (Oct, 1958)<\/a><\/p>\n

I’d never discourage anyone from making the most fun error messages<\/a> 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<\/em> than the same boring regular interactions, but with boring error messages instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apparently by 1958, mankind’s subservient relationship with computers was sadly well established, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,8],"tags":[452,444,305,208],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-quotes","category-usability","tag-error-messages","tag-errors","tag-history","tag-ibm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions\/338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}