The tutorial-on-tape story is both amusing and instructive; many innovative
products have been brought to market with "instructions" which required
understanding beyond what the new user was likely to have.  Many of the
first VCRs came with a video tape explaining how to connect the VCR to a
television; users who could view the tape had no need of it, and those who
needed it couldn't use it.  There's a lesson in there -- I have yet to see a
tutorial which, without a live teacher standing alongside, could take a
newbie with no programming experience (a child or otherwise) from starting
Squeak to doing something useful with it likely to inspire both confidence
and imagination and the beginnings of understanding.

Ideally, there should be no "stupid newbie questions."

Gary Fisher


----- Original Message -----
From: <G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 4:05 AM
Subject: RE: A stupid newbie question


> Well, one of the problems is in these big pictures, for example from the
> school-page that take so long to download: Will people wait?
>
> When a kind of toys-are-us-company in the Netherlands did introduce the
> Commodore-64 on the market (1985?) they created a tutorial program you had
> to load from tape: took at least 15 minutes. Most of the buyers where
> already back to the shop to tell that their machine was broken.
>