Consider watching the mother of all demos. The GUI paradigm we use today was intended to be for children. The intention was to have much more complex and composable UI for tech workers.
A lot of early users became programmers or sysadmins because they had to. Cliff Stoll was not the only scientist who suddenly found himself in charge of mainframes and learning everything about them. There wasn't a big pool of CS grads to do those things.
The shift to microcomputers enabled mass ownership by driving prices down and dumbing software down enough for everyone to use it. Except for price outliers like Macintosh and usability nightmares like blue screens.
Phones finally got us to today - ubiquitous, easy-to-use computers in everyone's pockets. Most users are clearly not programmers today. Nor do they want to be. Lumping all humans together as "operators" seems like a category error.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
A lot of early users became programmers or sysadmins because they had to. Cliff Stoll was not the only scientist who suddenly found himself in charge of mainframes and learning everything about them. There wasn't a big pool of CS grads to do those things.
The shift to microcomputers enabled mass ownership by driving prices down and dumbing software down enough for everyone to use it. Except for price outliers like Macintosh and usability nightmares like blue screens.
Phones finally got us to today - ubiquitous, easy-to-use computers in everyone's pockets. Most users are clearly not programmers today. Nor do they want to be. Lumping all humans together as "operators" seems like a category error.