🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1376@corpane.UUCP> sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) writes:
>ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes:
>>In article <199@modcomp.UUCP> srp@modcomp.UUCP (Steve Pietrowicz) writes:
>>>As far as I know, no other on-line service has this ability, and previous
>>>
>>	The WELL is a commercial system that has UUCP access both via mail
>
>D.I.S.K. is another online information service. (still small but we are trying!)
>Based on unix, like Portal or the Well, we offer in addition to multiplayer 

Ok, ok...by now I'm sure it's clear that if it's based on Unix, odds are
that the commercial service allows email.

I think that what Steve meant originally were the huge national online
services. It's difficult to draw a clean line between those and smaller
commercial services that offer national service due to PC Pursuit/Telenet
access, but there's some fuzzy distinction, at least. Although the big
ones may have a "full range of services" like stock quotes and data base
searches, they usually screw up on the "little" things like email and
Usenet connectivity, something the little guys are more likely to offer.

Seizing this opportunity for a favorite flame of mine: why is it that
all of these online services have user interfaces that absolutely SUCK??!
I know, all of you fans out there have gotten used to them and have
forgotten how much trouble they are...human beings are infinitely adaptable.
But we're in the 90's now, and most of them are using 60's style user
interfaces. Genie is the worst offender I've seen, but they're *all* bad.

I haven't seen Compuserve's interface for years, but the fact that they're
still using numeric user id's is very telling. Same with GE's ads for
Genie...the instructions for how to access them reflect the primitive
nature of their software. Portal (a little guy) has some nice ideas but
is inconvenient as hell in practice. The Well at least lets you drop into
the underlying Unix if you want to, but that's still a poor reason not to
provide a good user interface...their's is better than most but still not
especially great.

Apple, on the other hand, has really Done It Right with Applelink...a service
very limited in scope, but with a beautiful user interface. Fully iconic,
very intuitive.

Prodigy sounds like a nice idea, although I've heard some complaints from
users, so it may not have been implemented as nicely as the concept sounds.

And small scale BBS software...that's the worst. Absolutely primitive.
Kludgy. Hard to navigate. Extremely modal. Arbitrarily partitioned.
Minimal command sets. And every time some enterprising hacker writes
their own BBS software, they still seem to model the user interface on
what they're used to, which is the same old awful stuff.

About eight years ago I was a regular on Big Tree (in the Santa Cruz
mountains), the only BBS I've ever seen that had a tolerable user interface.
(This is to say that it *is* possible to do it nicely even in a text-only
slow baud environment.) It had its problems, but the author/sysop cared
very deeply about user interface, and it showed. Most of these other
services/BBS's seem to have been deeply influenced by JCL.
	Doug
-- 
Doug Merritt		{pyramid,apple}!xdos!doug
Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow		Professional Wildeyed Visionary