🚀 go-pugleaf

>I discovered them by myself.  Of course I was about 12 at the time and I
>know how slow older peoples minds are, they can't even program a VCR.  (I
>heard that a study found about 15% of all VCRs still flash 12:00 because
>the person doesn't know how to set the clock)  You discover the simple
>stuff (like moving the mouse, clicking etc.) first and quickly discover
>the rest with a minimum of instruction.

     As is DOS and Unix.  Commands like "copy", "erase", "ls", "move" and "<insert 
your favorite filename here>.exe(.exe optional, of course)" seem pretty simple
to me.
 
>Ease of use is completely divorced from power.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>
>> Nobody became a Mac expert simply by "just playing around with the software
>> for a little bit" instead of reading some books.  And the Mac books have
>> the reputation of being rather thick.  The internals are a little bit
>> more complicated than the GUI.  
>
   In defense of Hotel California, I've never, for the life of me, cracked open
my Mac Manual.  On the other hand, I've never seen my DOS manual either.  Is there
a Unix manual somewhere besides using "man" and "apropos"?  And I know that a
Windows and OS/2 manual is around here somewhere.  

>Almost everything I know about using Macs (quite a lot actually) I learned
>on my own without a manual by just playing around with the software to see
>what it can do.  It was the second computer I had ever touched. (The first
>being my old Commodore 64.  Not a smart decision on the part of my dad,
>but oh well.)  

    Lots of people do that with DOS and Unix.  Heck, I know people who have
used Macs for 10 years and still don't know that "force quit" or that the "funny
little button with the triangle on it" can turn on, shut off, and restart the 
computer.
    You do have a point, though.  As with DOS, I'm sure Unix and the MacOS have
lots of undocumented commands that you can't get by reading the manual.  I've
found several myself. 

    How many different commands are there for the Mac?  I'm looking for one 
specific one - being able to mark files much like the DOS "attrib" command, which
can mark "system file", make read-only, and hide files.