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I'm talking about usability for the everyday person, rather than major inventions.
I'd like to nominate the ability to press a key then type and it finds whatever you type - documents, programs, settings etc. First came out in Vista I think in Windows land...?
Plug and play/USB.
Serial connections used to be a complete nightmare.
Pinch-zoom
Oh yeah wozwoz, definitely.
First came out in Vista I think in Windows land...?
OS X had spotlight in 2004/5. Vista was 2006/7 I think. Likely both pinched it from some other more obscure OS though.
wysiwyg was pretty important. I remember using WordPerfect to write stuff, and all the formatting (like fonts, bold, underline) wasn't visible until you printed it out. Being able to see the actual font on the screen was a major step forward. I'm sure someone will tell me who did it first, but I'm guessing it was Apple copying Xerox.
Cloud.
It's second nature to me now, and it will be ubiquitous soon enough. Before too long the idea of local data storage will be laughable
Touch screen smartphones.
USB/plug n play.
Its not a UI thing, but the phasing out of DVD+/- R and all the varying formats..
It's second nature to me now, and it will be ubiquitous soon enough.
Not for everyone. Too many issues.
Luddite. History will prove me legendary. 😉
Multitasking/multiprocessing. Imagine if you needed a separate device for every task or you couldn't do one thing without closing down what you were doing, loading a new programme, completing that task etc etc etc.
Imagine if you needed a separate device for every task or you couldn't do one thing without closing down what you were doing
😆
Imagine? I was there!
In 20 years time Stoner will still be telling us all that we'll all be using the cloud soon. 😉
Plug and play/USB.Serial connections used to be a complete nightmare.
At least the polarisation on serial connectors is slightly more obvious!
Some of us still use serial connections...
Don't start that pissing war sonny....molgrips - Member
Imagine? I was there!
[img] 
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😆
SSD storage drives. Users expect iPad and Phone-like instant-on responsiveness.
And the cloud.
Spotlight was ported from Sherlock that was in MacOS 9.
My nomination? Wacom tablets.
Graphical user interface. Getting rid* of the command line was they key step in making computers viable for the masses.
* You can argue that it runs in parallel if you like.
USB flash drives.
A lot easier for moving files around, instead of slow/unreliable floppy disks or re-writable CDs
http
Easily findable donkey pr0n, surely?
Allegedly. 😀
SSD storage drives. Users expect iPad and Phone-like instant-on responsiveness.
It weird that never hits my as the most important thing going forward.
WiFi for getting rid of the need for so many cables, plugging a phone or tablet in should be the absolute exception these days.
bandwidth
Spelchek.
SSD is a revelation but more in application launch times. Turning even a fast system to instant launching and with bucket loads of memory, keep on launching big heavy weight apps in no time.
Though for me, not exactly a computer innovation but a side effect from the music world... twin deck tape recorders and C60 cassettes 😀
All those games you could copy! 😀
Bill Gates wants a word with you...
The 'cloud' has just become a marketing buzzword, most of the consumer services that purport to be 'in the cloud' aren't really, you may as well call anything not on your own PC 'the cloud' which is pish :p
I guess tablets still win for me; always on, touch screens, web browsing from the couch with minimal effort etc.
The development of microprocessors so that nowadays most people don't know or care what make or model is in their PC.
In the old days every six months there was something new, which geeks like me had to buy. 286, 386, 486, maths co-processors, over-clocking, fancy RAM, duel bus whatsits.
Now, I can run excel on a £99 tablet.
(Still need a massive laptop for CAD)
Tied up with PnP, PCI has to be a big one. It was the advent of PCI that finally did away with hours of setting jumpers on cards to configure IRQ, DMA, base address and so on. I worked in support before then and it was a bloody nightmare helping folk do that remotely, especially when everything was an add-on board rather than integrated into the motherboard. Sound card, graphics card, network card, modem, serial ports, parallel port, game port all needed frobbing manually to avoid clashes with each other. The fact that we're still using a variant of PCI today says it all.
Similarly, and it pains me to say it because it was wildly unpopular at the time, but Windows 95 / DirectX / "Games for Windows" was a paradigm shift. Prior to then, every new game you'd buy would require endless fiddling with config.sys / autoexec.bat and memory managers to squeeze out the last few drops of conventional memory in order to satisfy whatever specific requirements that particular title had.
plug and play in all its forms
size, as in the smallness of stuff, that's quite an innnovation, nobody would be wandering around with a mainframe in their pocket... here we are with iphones + galaxys + whatnot
the [s]cloud[/s] internet, that's been quite handy
mice + other pointing widgets + GUIs + desktop + multitasking and so on
Monitors that didn't have to do double duty as the family telly
Likely both pinched it from some other more obscure OS though.
that was in MacOS 9
I was right 😉
wysiwig... I'm sure someone will tell me who did it first, but I'm guessing it was Apple copying Xerox.
[url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company) ]Xerox PARC[/url]
Not really an innovation (much like much of the above) but MS Office caused a revolution in the way people worked and was the thing that put a computer on everyone's desk.
paper tape so I didn't have to keep feeding these punched cards in individually and getting in a mess if I dropped the pile 😉
Reliable secure digital payments - can you imagine life without[s] eBay, Amazon,[/s] CRC
WYSIWYG
multitasking
GUIs
As someone who ends up cobbling docs together oh Format Painter how I love thee.
Come on, it's UNDO isn't it? I could take or leave most of teh rest but life definitley got better with undo..
Energy efficiency and battery design. The stuff we can do on portable devices now is mindblowing.
Smartphones - being able to do so much on a device you can hold in one hand - amazing.
Progress bars that give you an accurate estimate of how long something is going to take. Oh wait...
Nah that's unavoidable really. At least for most tasks. What they have done is make them circular which doesn't mislead.
What they have done is make them circular which doesn't mislead.
... or tell you anything useful.
other than 'I'm doing stuff, probably'
Progress bars that give you an accurate estimate of how long something is going to take. Oh wait...
.. or tell you anything useful.
other than 'I'm doing stuff, probably'
Amazing how human like they've been able to make computers.
Oh wait...
How long for?
AH, the NCR Century 100.. computing when you needed to keep a fire extinguisher handy!
GUIs and windowing systems for me. Seem like they've been around for ever, but where would we be with out Xerox.
I started my professional coding career using an 8 bit assembler language to code business apps like ledgers and costing systems.
tbh, everything after that has seemed like a major innovation.
"System 25 also pioneered in ICL use of Winchester-technology (35MB) fixed discs"
[b]35 whole megabytes[/b] and they weren't on removable platters like the older systems we supported where you could destroy a database by trying to carry the disk platters across the machine room to the cupboard whilst a bit drunk (ahem).
[img] 
[/img]
[edit] those big cabinets at the front - they're the hard drives.
where would we be with out Xerox.
Someone else would have invented it sooner or later (or something similar, perhaps even better) I expect.
CraigW - Member
USB flash drives.
A lot easier for moving files around, instead of slow/unreliable floppy disks or re-writable CDs
I was going to say this myself, but it bears repeating. The idea that in one, tiny little plastic thing I can carry a decent-sized library together with all my work, and plug it effortlessly into any computer wherever I am, is not so much amazing as just infinitely usable.
So for me, it's got to be flash memory and what that's made possible.
[i]The idea that in one, tiny little plastic thing I can carry a decent-sized library together with all my work, and plug it effortlessly into any computer wherever I am, is not so much amazing as just infinitely usable. [/i]
There's quite a large proportion of the sort of people who have to install, maintain, take backups and ensure security on systems who would change the word 'usable' to 'scarey' in that sentence and not feel the need to change anything else in it.
I think it has to be the iPhone for me. There are loads of good suggestions up there, but I don't think anything has transformed computing from a workplace/technical paradigm into such broad consumer-adoption like the advent of smartphones and subsequent mobile devices. The fact that Joe Bloggs consumer has levels of exception beyond what most technology firms can actually deliver is testament to that.
On the software side - Desktop publishing revolutionised the Print industry.
Things that took lots of skill and many hours with camera and film in a darkroom could be done in seconds or minutes.
Long file names. Was a headline feature of Windows 95, but I know Macintosh System 6 (at least) already had them. Probably RiscOS and some others too.
Suddenly your "RPT1_1993.doc" could be "Accounts Report Jan to April 1995". Pretty big usability improvement.
Actually RiscOS has a few other interesting ahead-of-their-time type things as well:
- System wide font anti-aliasing (therefore realistic WYSIWYG rather than bitmap on screen, TTF on print as everything else had)
- app directories (which MacOS now uses to support multiple-architectures)
- file metadata rather than filename extensions to determine types
- UI driven almost entirely by drag and drop
Actually RiscOS has a few other interesting ahead-of-their-time type things as well:
Amiga OS had a lot of that, and pre-dates it. That was certainly ahead of its time.
American Government \ Military making the Internet available, initially to the scientific community and subsequently to the world at large.
http (as already mentioned) and the mosaic browser.
Windows GUI (think IBM X windows was the first, though probably wrong) but Microsoft obviously stole the show.
Integrated Office suite (Being able to cut and paste from documents to spreadsheets etc) rather that a disparate collection of applications from various providers whereby you had to export, massage and import data (if it was possible at all).
Digital Cameras (and phones with Cameras)
Tablets
This far in and finally a mention of RISC. Sadly no mention of all the British-designed ARM chips which make our modern e-world possible.
Google Acorn Electronics or Acorn RISC Machine.
Those of you old enough / been reading the obsolete computer thread might remember BBC Micro & Acorn Electrons.
Oh for our British pluck and 'cottage industries'.
Pissed off my Dad didn't buy the Acorn shares he was offered in ooooh 1985-6. Instead went of to Honeywell. What would that be worth today? Like early shares in Msoft or Apple.
Glad my Dad is still about after a fairly big heart scare last year.
American Government \ Military making the Internet available, initially to the scientific community and subsequently to the world at large.
PMSL / Spat G&T out at that one laddie!
CERN made what you now know as the internet available.
Expecting DARPANET / ARPANET / FOIL HAT WEARERS along any moment
Read history Boy! If you cannot read history suggest Wikithingy Tim Berners-Lee, CERN internet development. Fer Firks sake - stuff done at CERN is shared - that's one of it's principles - That's interesting. Let's tell folks.
Oh wait - it was made from reverse-engineered alien technology kept in hanger XX { not allowed to tell} and we never went to the moon. Phew glad my foil hat is on.
Come on, it's UNDO isn't it? I could take or leave most of teh rest but life definitley got better with undo..
I used to laugh back at ANSYS back at uni due to its totally backward sans-undo interface.
Fast forward five years and most of my working day is spent using the same software. Not quite so funny now...
MacBook Air – it lasts a working day without top-up juice 🙂
Appreciate not up there with http, but it makes a big difference to my working day.
Comic Sans I reckon. A font that was truly appropriate and usable for every context. 😉
mrblobby - Member
Actually RiscOS has a few other interesting ahead-of-their-time type things as well:
Amiga OS had a lot of that, and pre-dates it. That was certainly ahead of its time.
Yeah definitely, Amiga workbench was seriously impressive for its day. But which of those features did it have?
- System wide font anti-aliasing (therefore realistic WYSIWYG rather than bitmap on screen, TTF on print as everything else had)
Not until after RiscOS AFAIK
- app directories (which MacOS now uses to support multiple-architectures)
Maybe, not sure?
- file metadata rather than filename extensions to determine types
Maybe, not sure?
- UI driven almost entirely by drag and drop
Yes but AFAIK not to the extent of RiscOS where for example, you used drag drop to save files by directly dragging them to the folder you wanted (no file browser in the save window)
I did like the fact you could drag the entire workbench out of the way to get back to your game or app running underneath. Great bit of UI which made the most of how the hardware worked.
CERN made what you now know as the internet available
Don't be silly. Berners lee invented http, there's a lot more to the internet than that, and there was plenty going on on it before it was invented.
Comic Sans I reckon. A font that was truly appropriate and usable for every context.
Only ever to be used if you are an eight year old girl writing about unicorns. 👿
berners-lee asked our boss to write a http editor (we already did desktop hypertext editor).
He was turned down ;0)
...so Mosaic was born..
Risc OS (and Arthur before it) had the task bar way before Windows 95.
As for Acorn and ARM history and their battle with Sir Clive, worth a watch and chuckle...
[url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92 ]Micro Men[/url]
Not on iPlayer but YouTube has it currently