20 Jan
2023
20 Jan
'23
6:55 a.m.
Mike Lesk is interesting on this. He said to me that if you assume people
are idiots they learn to behave to your expectations and if you treat them
with the respect they deserve they grow. It was in the context of library
index systems and "do you want easy mode" clippy style vs terse but
functional.
Many specialist secretary roles in times past were simply underpaid subject
matter experts even on a typing pool. Huge amounts of expert knowledge.
The data entry staff at Edinburgh uni notoriously corrected student
programs doing cardpunch work.
There's no 'just' in women's work. As the Chinese maoist poster said:
"women hold up half the sky".
G
On Fri, 20 Jan 2023, 10:47 Yeechang Lee, <ylee(a)columbia.edu> wrote:
Rich Salz says:
To me, the biggest surprise about Unix history is
that the Bell
patent office secretaries were able to use ed and [nt]roff.
I've similarly heard that Sun secretaries were pretty adept at using Emacs.
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