::scr saving

[Andy Wardley]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 12:27:46PM +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
> It was bought up a few months ago in a discussion with some of my
> friends that the whole idea of having to hit Save in applications is
> stupid and a throwback to stupider days.

Absolutely.  One of Raskin's finer points, too.  One of his early 
inventions before he went to do Mac was an abscure machine called 
the Canon Cat.  

One of many neat features was that there was no "load/save" just a 
"disk" button.  You put a floppy in, hit the "disk" button and it
loaded the contents into memory.  When you wanted to save your changes
back to disk, you hit the "disk" button.  Easy for the machine to 
work out that the memory has changed (so save back to disk) or the 
disk has changed (load into memory).

Better still is to do away with the concept of files that need opening,
saving and closing.  Just make it all automatic like Emacs doing an 
autosave with bells on.  After all, why should I have to do some 
explicit operation to permanantly save the work I've done?  After all, 
I typed it in, so presumably I want to keep whatever I typed.

The answer is that it's just a throwback to days when we didn't have
cheap disks, or you had to rewind a tape when you wanted to save 
something.

Look at the real-world analogy: when you write with a pen on paper, the
effect is permanent.  You don't have to hit some "save paper" button to
stop the ink from dissappearing before your eyes.  Of course, you might
not file the paper away anywhere and might end up chucking it in the 
bin, but at least you don't lose what you wrote just because the power
went down.

Our computer systems are still in the dark ages because we're tied to
the apron strings of decades-old technologies like hierarchical file
systems and application centric operating systems.

Oops, slipped into a rant... :-)


A