> The plural of anecdote is not data.

It is if you're measuring anecdotes per second (a/s).

Right, but you can do scripting, queries, editing, etc. in a GUI.

What I could never figure out is why they didn't add CLI-like powers to the GUI, i.e. drag-and-drop pipes, stdin/stdout options, find/select and a bunch of other stuff that is what makes Unix so great to work with.

Is it just lack of imagination, being unable to come up with a graphical metaphor for CLI-style operations?

Yeah, the Cat was a failure, but it did kind of prove his point.

"Canon, possibly because the moribund Electronic Typewriter Division had been given the task, failed to market the product effectively, and it is now a dead cat.

"How in the world do you sell something that's different? That's the biggest problem. The world's not quite ready to believe. It's like in the early days at Apple, they said, 'What's it good for?' We couldn't give a really good answer so they assumed the machine wasn't going to sell. But I do know the way I plan to sell my product is by word of mouth. Some people will try it and say, 'This product really gets my job done. It doesn't have fifteen fonts. I can't print it out in old gothic banners five feet long, but I sure got that article finished under the deadline.' That's how I can sell it. Later, people will understand it.

"One of the prophets of the personal computer industry, Alan Kay, has said that the true personal computer has not yet been made. I disagree. We have, as the ancient curse warns us, gotten what we asked for. We do indeed have computers being bought by individuals for themselves; they are 'personal computers'. The problem is that many of us didn't want computers in the first place—computers are merely boxes for running programs—we wanted the benefits that computer technology has to offer. What we wanted was to ease the workload in information related areas much as washing machines and vacuum cleaners ease the workload in maintaining cleanliness.

"By choosing to focus on computers rather than the tasks we wanted done, we inherited much of the baggage that had accumulated around earlier generations of computers. It is more a matter of style and operating systems that need elaborate user interfaces to support huge application programs. These structures demand ever larger memories and complex peripherals. It's as if we had asked for a bit of part-time help and were given a bureaucracy."

It's been speculated that Apple only provided a version of Unix to comply with requirements for obtaining government contracts.

But I do recall a number of Mac proponents asserting that the GUI was vastly superior to command-line, and that Unix was a dinosaur.

Jef Raskin, founder of the Macintosh project, said at one point: "We have a whole valley full of people talking UNIX versus MS-DOS. What do you need any of that for? Just throw it all out; get rid of all that nonsense. Maybe you need it for computer scientists, but for people who want to get something done, no. Do you need an operating system? No."

Weren't there two movies with this plot? One was called "Risky Business", and can anyone answer the name of the other one? Bueller? Bueller?

The Cat in the Hat?

> Guessing they meant Sue..

I duspect you're right!

"You'll need a stiff drink, when you see the size of these damned trousers!"

People look at me funny when I keep pushing against museum walls and going "uh! uh! uh!"

As Jef Raskin wrote in The Humane Interface:

"The system should treat all user input as sacred."

"A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm."

"Skynet becomes self-aware at 02:14 am Eastern Time after its activation on Nov. 4, 2018 and immediately begins shitposting on 4chan."

"Your ignorance seems to have no limit. Your opinions are idiotic. Your personal hygiene leaves much to be desired. Your family is ugly."

If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn't have bothered to grow up!

I think soon, automation and our current economic and political system won't fit together anymore.

Curiously, there's a short documentary about that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxe3N8ARdbg

The killer app is in fact VR video. The studios haven't realized that yet.

I have a Gear VR (gifted to me) which is pretty neat. However, when I tried to watch a feature-length movie (I rented The Martian in 3D) it was disappointing.

The 3D effect was far better than a TV with shutter glasses, but the resolution on my Galaxy S6 was not sufficient to make out far details in the scene.

Add to that that the phone kept overheating and had to pause the movie to cool down, then the battery was exhausted before I reached the end of the movie... there's little to recommend it.

I'm not too keen on sitting tethered to a PC to watch a movie, either, so hopefully the mobile VR experience will improve to the point that movies are watchable.

I just can't seem to put it down!