Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound

2. From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

47  From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly In the Old Testament there was the first apple, the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which with one taste sent Adam, Eve, and all mankind into the great current of History. The second apple was Isaac Newton’s, the symbol of our entry into the age of modern science. The Apple Computer’s symbol was not chosen purely at random: it represents the third apple, the one that widens the paths of knowledge leading toward the future. —Jean-Louis Gassée, The Third Apple Digging to Denaturalize The second cut into the ground of our technological past in this study of reading/writing interfaces is into the era of the GUIbased personal computer that was preceded by Douglas Engelbart , Alan Kay, and Seymour Papert’s experiments with computing and interface design from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. This era began with expandable homebrew kits and irrevocably transformed into so-called user-friendly, closed workstations with the release of the Apple Macintosh in late January 1984.¹ Whereas chapter 1 delves into the computing industry’s present push to take us more deeply into the era of the interface-free, this chapter uncovers an earlier rupture in the history of computing that partly laid the groundwork for the interface-free. I look more specifically into the idea that the interface is equal parts user and machine, so that the extent to which the interface is designed to mask its underlying machine-based processes for the sake of the user is the extent to which these same users are disempowered, as they are unable to understand— let alone actively create—using the computer. This chapter 48 From the Open to the User-Friendly concerns itself with a decade in which we can track the shift from a user-friendly computer as a tool that through a graphical user interface (GUI) encouraged understanding, tinkering, and creativity to a user-friendly computer that used a GUI to create an efficient workstation for productivity and task management , as well as the effect of this shift, particularly on digital literary production. Further, the turn from computer systems based on the command-line interface to those based on “direct-manipulation” interfaces that were iconic or graphical was driven by rhetoric that insisted the GUI, particularly that pioneered by the Apple Macintosh design team, was not just different from the command-line interface but naturally better , easier, friendlier. As I outline, the Macintosh was, as JeanLouis Gassée (who headed up its development after Steve Jobs’s departure in 1985) writes without any hint of irony, “the third apple,” after the first apple in the Old Testament and the second apple that was Isaac Newton’s, “the one that widens the paths of knowledge leading toward the future.”² It’s worth noting that despite Gassée’s hyperbole, which I use to demonstrate the ideological fervor of those working for Apple in the 1980s, his vision for Macintosh was quite different from Jobs’s in that Gassée helped shepherd into the market three models of the Macintosh—the Mac Plus, the Mac II, and the Mac SE—that were all expandable, unlike the first-generation Macintosh, which prevented users from opening up the computer by giving them a small electrical shock if they did not adhere to the warnings. (I should point out, however, that the device was not deliberately booby-trapped so much as the Macintosh’s power supply required very careful handling, a fact that made it all the more convenient to warn users away from opening it up at all.) While these later models of the Macintosh included expansion slots, which returned Apple philosophically to the era of Steve Wozniak’s Apple II—whose eight expansion slots permitted a whole range of display controllers, memory boards, hard disks, etc.—it seems clear that the return of Jobs to Apple in 1997 meant, and continues to mean, a return to keeping the inner From the Open to the User-Friendly 49 workings of Apple computers and computing devices firmly closed off to users. Despite studies released since 1985 that clearly demonstrate GUIs are not necessarily better than command-line interfaces in terms of how easy they are to learn and to use, Apple— particularly, under Jobs’s leadership—created such a convincing aura of inevitable superiority...