Comment The telephone (Score 3, Interesting) 168
If you want my opinion on the worst interface of all time, look no further than the telephone. Think about it. If you want to call someone, you have to enter a bunch of digits. And what do these digits mean? Well, every country seems to do things differently, but in the US, the first three digits are the area code (which supposedly tells you roughly where they are), the next three are a prefix (which once told you what switch you were going through), and the last four are the line number. But today we have number portability and mobile devices, so none of these numbers really mean anything anymore. Furthermore, one person may have multiple numbers (home phone, mobile phone, work phone), and a single number may reach multiple people (some work places use a single number for an entire office, relying on extensions to reach individuals). People's phone numbers can and do change regularly (job changes, new home phone number, etc). And of course caller ID doesn't always give you the true number of the caller. Many companies will use their toll-free number for the caller ID, and scammers pretty much always put in a fake number. And on top of all that, there is a rather limited quantity of phone number available. The whole system of phone numbers is so badly broken and deficient, it's amazing we even bother to use it anymore.
And yet people don't seem to mind it at all. Sure, I hear complaints about scammers spoofing phone numbers, but if that could be fixed, it seems like people would be perfectly happy with the current phone number situation. Personally, I wish we could move from PSTN to SIP with its addresses that resemble email addresses, because it's a lot easier to identify john.smith@example.com than 1-738-398-2835. SIP would also mean I'm no longer dependent on a phone company for my phone service, as long as I have the technical know-how to setup my own.