How did people here learn GUIs

[Janina Sajka]

Excellent points, Martin.

I often wish I'd learned vim or emacs rather than Word Perfect 5.2, and
then 6.0. Both vim and emacs are still useful, and that knowledge would
serve me today. You need to work in an old law office to still find wp
skills useful.

Same goes for bash and c. The list goes on, too.

Janina

Martin McCormick writes:
> 	This has been extremely fascinating as many of the rest
> of you report things that are familiar to me. I am also retired
> now but for 25 years, I ran Oklahoma State University's domain
> name and dhcp servers as well as built a lot of automation for
> our network operations group.
> 
> 	My job as stated by my boss when I was hired in 1990 was
> to learn Unix and the C language and learn all the tools there in which, to
> me, was like being payed to play all day with the idea that I use
> that knowledge to make our group more productive.
> 
> 	The problem with learning GUI's for me was not the
> concept so much as knowing what keys to push to make it work. I
> actively avoided Windows since for most of my working life,
> most Windows screen readers were outrageously expensive money
> pits in which you basically pay double or triple for your work
> station. I could have gotten all the JAWS I wanted in my job, but
> I knew I would one day not be working there any more and would
> have to caugh up that money myself if I got too much in to
> Windows.
> 
> 	I did eagerly start on the Mac around 2007 and have a
> Dell system that sometimes runs a version of orca which I think
> is a beautiful creation. The name ubuntu is supposed to mean
> "something good from the efforts of many" in an African language
> and it is incredible that it doesn't cost a thing to just go out
> and get it. It makes me almost feel guilty to use it, not having
> contributed anything yet.
> 
> 	If you have good spacial concepts, you can think of where
> things are on the screen and then you must understand what to do
> when you hear or read terms like Scroll Bar or encounter a table
> in Macos or orca. 
> 
> 	To me, that can be very frustrating to run in to
> something new while trying to fix something else but I am afraid
> that that is life.
> 
> 	I have to admit that after 25 years, I can usually make a
> C program work and there are still lots of things to learn about
> Unix but I have never regretted going this route as it appears to
> build on solid ground and as someone else here stated, it doesn't
> take anything away but adds to it and makes it better.
> 
> 	There is also nothing like the registry and I am over the
> moon glad about that.
> 
> Martin
> Jude DaShiell <jdashiel at panix.com> writes:
> > I learned Unix way before I touched any of its gui's. The flavor of unix 
> > my
> > employer had was bsd and it had the learn utility operational. I was able
> > to go through many of those lessons and read man pages and then got into a
> > unix class. Later me and some other members of the penguin users group 
> > took
> > about a year to figure it all out but I finally got Redhat 5.0 installed
> > and talking. From there I tried out Slackware (no longer a viable
> > accessibility alternative) and then moved along to debian. I got help with
> > the last two installations and the idea it would be possible by listening
> > to some of those main menu programs on acbradio. I did a little bit with
> > orca while employed at home but have had more time for it now I'm retired.
> > I also got into archlinux while employed and still use that flavor of 
> > linux
> > allbeit on a separate hard drive.
> > 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa