By Gregory A. Farley

For us highly paid publishing professionals, it makes pretty good sense that what we do with computers closely emulates what we do with paper, because we make paper documents — it is our job.

But for others, this desktop emulation seems quaint at least, and backwards and inefficient at worst. And it's because software vendors and engineers and computing industry visionaries haven't been visionary enough. They've computerized our traditions, our workplace paradigms (forgive me), but they haven't taken us past the present. We're supposed to be processing information, not paper. How can we throw off our paper-based mind-set when our computers take us back to it every time we boot them up?


Anything is better than DOS
Personally, I love the desktop GUI. My first computer was an early Macintosh SE, and I used it throughout the last years of my college experience. But my final required course in the journalism program mandated that I complete assignments and file articles electronically, using WordPerfect on an IBM compatible, years before Bill Gates decided to do Windows. Maybe if I hadn't been spoiled by the Mac — if I hadn't known how simple computing should be — I wouldn't have been so befuddled by the arcane and twisted gobbledygook that is DOS. But mastering the handful of commands necessary to meet the course requirements took far longer than the fact-gathering and writing.

Apple's desktop GUI, compared to DOS, was outstandingly simple, elegant and intuitive. But schoolchildren today may never work in jobs that require that they sit at desks or file paper documents away in folders. The desktop GUI we have grown dependent upon will soon lose its frame of reference, and it will take more than intuition for newcomers to figure it out.

The hardware developers have certainly done their part. Computers grow smaller, faster and cheaper every week. At a manufacturing conference sponsored by Sun Microsystems two years ago, I learned that had automobiles paralleled the performance/cost ratio of computers, we'd all be driving $19 Rolls Royces. But while manufacturers continue to make more powerful machines, little is being done to make computers easier to use. Apple, in fact, dumped the teams developing its Cyberdog and Open Doc technologies (both exciting interface developments) in its recent round of layoffs and is instead pouring its resources into porting the NeXT GUI (another desktop analogy) to its hardware. Microsoft's Windows 95 update will stick with the desktop GUI, too.


What did you say?
I started wondering about interfaces while looking through some material provided to me by Speech Systems Inc. for inclusion in the warehousing supplement that mailed along with this issue of the magazine. Consider for a moment an interface that is utterly ungraphical and completely hands off — no mouse, no keyboard, no display. An interface to a wearable computer that speaks to the user, listens for an answer, inquires as to the veracity of its own understanding, and then does as its told. In a strictly pragmatic sense, the Speech Systems order picking application and the Norand wearable computer technologies allow the warehouse worker to use two hands to do a job that requires two hands.

From the user interface perspective, however, this is visionary stuff. It's a computer that's just there, all the time, communicating with the server in real time. It's as intuitive as speaking. It's part of a uniform. It's an intriguing step in a fascinating direction, because the technology has been applied with regard only for the process — the job that is being performed — and without regard for "computing" as we have come to know it.

Virtual reality systems may offer the same truly intuitive interface, free of computing and process conceits. At a different conference two years ago I saw firsthand a virtual reality interface in action. Although it wasn't much of an application (the user, or wearer, was limited to walking around a virtual warehouse and observing the material handling equipment inside), its developer explained to me some of its possible applications. A network of programmable controllers and monitors feeding data to a host computer in real time would enable a supervisor to actually look inside a machine to ascertain why it is producing out-of-spec parts. The supervisor could see backups, monitor queues and inspect equipment within the virtual factory, which mirrors the actual factory. The shop floor manager's computer interface would be a digital facsimile of the shop floor rather than a CRT screen full of rows of numbers.

Copyright © 2020 by APICS — The Educational Society for Resource Management. All rights reserved.

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