“But even “good” metaphors don’t always work. For instance, in an informal survey of Macintosh-literate university students, many people failed to employ the word “desktop” anywhere in their description of the Finder.”
(Brenda Laurel, “Computers as theatre,” p. 5, 1993)
“My favorite Macintosh example is an error message that I sometimes encounter while running Multifinder: “Excel (or some other application) has unexpectedly quit.” “Well,” I usually reply, “the capricious little bastard!””
(Brenda Laurel, “Computers as theatre,” p. 63, 1993)
“No. It’s no evolution at all. It’s no advance at all. [The users are still] stuck in this morass of overlapping windows.”
“The NeXT machine’s “black hole” icon is an interesting alternative [to Macintosh’s trash can], but as a metaphor it suggests a disturbing irreversibility. One can, after all, take things back out of a trash can – usually.”
(Brenda Laurel, “Computers as theatre,” p. 131, 1993)
“Whatever Apple’s plans are, we think it extremely unlikely that it would introduce a similar product that would undercut their Lisa system so soon after its costly development and introduction. Indeed, we cannot see the benefit that would be gained by such action. So, whatever MacIntosh [sic] may turn out to be and whenever it finally appears, we think it is more likely that it will be clearly differentiated from the Lisa offering.”
(Joseph L. Ehardt, The Seybold Report on Professional Computing, January 1983)
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