alt Hacker NewsThe computer form factor hasn’t changed since the mainframe: look into a screen for where to give input, select visual icons via a pointer, type text via keyboard into a text entry box, hit an action button, recieve result, repeat
it’s just all gotten miniaturized
Humans have outright rejected all other possible computer form factors presented to them to date including:
Purely NLP with no screen
head worn augmented reality
contact lenses,
head worn virtual reality
implanted touch sensors
etc…
Every other possible form factor gets shit on, on this website and in every other technology newspaper.
This is despite almost a century of a attempts at doing all those and making zero progress in sustained consumer penetration.
Had people liked those form factors they would’ve been invested in them early on, such that they would develop the same way the laptops and iPads and iPhones and desktops have evolved.
However nobody’s even interested at any type of scale in the early days of AR for example.
I have a litany of augmented and virtual reality devices scattered around my home and work that are incredibly compelling technology - but are totally seen as straight up dogshit from the consumer perspective.
Like everything it’s not a machine problem, it’s a human people in society problem
Replies
Since mainframes, you say. Well, sonny, when I first learned programming on a mainframe, we had punch cards and fan-fold printouts. Nothing beats that, eh?
Phone UIs are still screen UIs, but they are not desktop UIs, and that's not because of the shape of the device.
I do not see laptop computers as the same form factor as mainframes. At. All.
Even more, I don't see phones as the same form factor as mainframes.
> Purely NLP with no screen
Cumbersome and slow with horrible failure recovery. Great if it works, huge pain in the ass if it doesn't. Useless for any visual task.
> head worn augmented reality
Completely useless if what you're doing doesn't involve "augmenting reality" (editing a text document), which probably describes most tasks that the average person is using a computer for.
> contact lenses
Effectively impossible to use for some portion of the population.
> head worn virtual reality
Completely isolates you from your surroundings (most people don't like that) and difficult to use for people who wear glasses. Nevermind that currently they're heavy, expensive, and not particularly portable.
> implanted sensors
That's going to be a very hard sell for the vast majority of people. Also pretty useless for what most people want to do with computers.
The reason these different form factors haven't caught on is because they're pretty shit right now and not even useful to most people.
The standard desktop environment isn't perfect, but it's good and versatile enough for what most people need to do with a computer.