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Back in the fifties, sixties and seventies, there was what can only be described as a "computer priesthood" of programmers and system operators. Software was written for the convenience of them, not for the convenience of the people making the requests. More often than not, user interaction consisted, at most, of keypunching a deck of Hollerith cards, and being handed a printed report that, more often than not, wasn't laid out in a particularly useful way. Software was inflexible and cumbersome, and rather than making people's work easier and more productive, it frequently made it harder. When people had billing or payroll errors, or even just had their names misspelled in somebody's records, corrections frequently became far more difficult than they were with pen-and-ink systems (not to mention hampered by a "the computer says it; it must be right" attitude). When McDonalds went from taking orders on paper to taking them with computer terminals, certain special orders that could once simply be scribbled onto the grill ticket suddenly became impossible, because there was no provision for it in the order-entry software.
That's the sort of thing that interactive terminals, high school programming classes, and desktop computers, were supposed to eliminate.
And don't go holding up Microsloth as a shining beacon of anything other than hubris, arrogance, and just plain laziness. For over a decade and a half, their answer to everything has been to throw more memory and disk space at the problem, to add features based on "gee whiz" factors, rather than on what most users need, want, or are actually going to have a practical use for, to use market leverage to choke out competitors with better products, and to make their products far more secure against competition or customization than they are against viruses or worms.
Case in point: I'm spending my morning today fixing an exit program for a customer because when it was originally written, there were gaps in our understanding of the customer's requirements, causing some things to work exactly backwards from the way they should, and causing other things to be left out entirely.
-- JHHL
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