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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by tialaramex on Sunday February 09, 2025 @05:51AM (#42989874)
This course mentions the famous Apple advertisement. Unfortunately it slightly oversells and while I'm sure that's not because this fragment was written by an LLM it is exactly the sort of over-simplification which leads to LLMs generating wild bullshit when they interpolate this "fact" with other "facts" they've been fed, and we ought to strive to do better when writing for humans.

"Describe how prior to 1984, there was no such thing as a graphical user interface, visual desktop, an intuitive menu system, or mouse-based navigation."

Apple were offering a mass market product which had these features so that's important - but there had been "such a thing" for quite some time before that. Douglas Engelbart's "Mother Of All Demos" in 1968 -- Sixteen years earlier shows all the features you mentioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Unfortunately the demo is very long for a modern audience, so unlike "Watch a Superbowl ad" it's a hard sell to show the entire demo, but do go watch for yourself.

Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by rightbyte on Sunday February 09, 2025 @06:52AM (#42990096)
I like the distinction between "teletypes" and the new fancy "glass teletypes".
Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by leoc on Sunday February 09, 2025 @09:34AM (#42990921)
Jimmy Carter installed a Xerox Alto in the White House in 1978! https://www.ourmidland.com/news/article/Check-out-the-first-... Never mind the Xerox Star, or Apple shipping the Lisa in 1983 ...
Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by ctbergstrom on Sunday February 09, 2025 @04:54PM (#42994455)
You're right of course.

In the original drafts I had a long section on this, including some of the history of the GUI, the development of the mouse, etc. It was way too much for the main text when the point is just to set up a metaphor for students who have seen a Mac 128.

That said, we can and should do better in the instructor guide. Thanks for the reminder. I'll add some context there.