Thread View: alt.folklore.computers
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Started by k... Ken Yap
Fri, 21 Sep 1990 03:55
Re: press any key
Author: k... Ken Yap
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 1990 03:55
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 1990 03:55
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I once worked on a radioimmunoassay program and there was this menu with 5 choices plus "quit". I decided that I would take anything outside 1 to 5 as quit and the menu read: 1. ... ... Anything else: quit The project manager complained that this was confusing and suggested that I just make it say: 6. Quit He wasn't asking me to change the code, just the prompt. I think he was right. People get confused by too many choices. I suspect all these stories about not finding the ANY key would be avoided if the instructions just said: Press space bar to continue Now if the user doesn't know what the space bar is, then you have a problem.
Re: press any key
Author: h... Henry Troup
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 1990 14:11
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 1990 14:11
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In article <1990Sep21....@csis.dit.csiro.au> k...@csis.dit.csiro.au (Ken Yap) writes: > Press space bar to continue > >Now if the user doesn't know what the space bar is, then you have a problem. Back when I did that sort of software, I used that prompt and accepted 'any' key. This of course means anything the OS doesn't steal. -- Henry Troup - BNR owns but does not share my opinions | No humor available today uunet!bnrgate!hwt%bwdlh490 H...@BNR.CA +1 613-765-2337 | try again tomorrow.
Re: press any key
Author: sc... Scott Yelich
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 1990 18:38
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 1990 18:38
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>>Now if the user doesn't know what the space bar is, then you have a problem.
>Back when I did that sort of software, I used that prompt and accepted
>'any' key. This of course means anything the OS doesn't steal.
Like the little depressed space/key on the TRS80 Model III...
The one where my hand naturally rests...
The one that resets the machine...
``Press any key''
[PRESS]
``Ooooooh!''
(Of course, sampled sound greatly improves this machine response.)
Schools had Apple][s.... fine. You could sample sounds on those
beasts! All you had to do was sample a 1/4-2/3 second sample of
``OUCH!'' and tie it to any [normal] keypress to confuse new
students. Oh, that an run gremlins, of course, it would be nice if it
were harder to reboot those machines --> ``This machine is acting
strangely! [CLICK]''
Since this is folklore...
The Atari 410, that write only device, used multiple tracks.
One for data and another for other things such as an audio recording.
I managed to cook up a geography project when I was in 8th grade that
showed some climate zones of Africa and gave an audio report while the
program was running. The only problem was that the tape device could
not rewind the tape on command.... but it could be turned on and off
through simple memory writes. It was pretty impressive when the
computer was visible (with it's membrane keyboard and 16k!) and yet it
talked like a human, in fact, it talked a lot like I did! :-)
ps: gr8 took 8k (8192bytes, at least) which left me with some 8k to program!
It reminds me of my casio ~400 step programmable calculators... In that
space I have programmed a few games, such as hunt the wumpus, Xstory,
Stop Thief and Sahara Death-- Yes, high school can be boring.
--
Signature follows. [Skip now]
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Scott D. Yelich scott@[xanth.]cs.odu.edu [128.82.8.1]
After he pushed me off the cliff, he asked me, as I fell, ``Why'd you jump?''
Administrator of: Game-Design requests to <game-desi...@cs.odu.edu>
ODU/UNIX/BSD/X/C/ROOT/XANTH/CS/VSVN/
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