Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

Chapter Five. Unification

It is immensely ingenious, immensely complicated, and extremely effective, but somehow at the same time crude, wasteful, and inelegant, and one feels that there must be a better way of doing things.

—C. Strachey (speaking not of Windows but of the IBM Stretch computer in 1962)

In trying to create a general-purpose interface that takes into account the requirements that we have delineated in the previous four chapters, we find that basic changes from present practice are necessary. Many directions are possible; one tack is to see what we can do within the limitations of the Internet and with the hundreds of millions of computers and information appliances that exist and that are being manufactured today.

The most common ...