So this little article has travelled pretty far! There were a lot of good tips, comments and insights into the origin of [x] but none as good as this email that I received from Windows 95 team member Daniel Oran.
“Hi Lauren,
A friend forwarded me your Medium piece, “X to Close.” He remembered that I had worked on Windows 95 at Microsoft — I created the Start Button and Taskbar — and thought I’d be amused. I was! :-)
It’s fun to see how history gets written when you actually lived those long-ago events. I joined Microsoft in 1992 as a program manager for the user interface of “Chicago,” which was the code name for what eventually became Windows 95.
So, who was responsible for this last minute change? As far as I can tell, this person is responsible for the proliferation and widespread use of [x] in UI design today.
It wasn’t a last-minute change. During 1993, we considered many variations of the close-button design. And the source wasn’t Atari. It was NeXT, which had an X close button in the upper right, along with the grayscale faux-3D look that we borrowed for Windows 95.
I wanted to put the Windows X close button in the upper left, but that conflicted with the existing Windows Alt-spacebar menu and also a new program icon, which we borrowed fromOS/2, on which Microsoft had originally partnered with IBM.
Attached is the earliest Chicago bitmap I could find that includes an X close button. It’s dated 9/22/1993. (In attaching the file to this email, I just realized that it’s so old that it has only an eight-character name. Before Windows 95, that was the limit.)
Thanks for your very entertaining essay!
Best,
Danny”
I guess you could say case [x]ed.
Thanks again to everyone who helped track down earlier examples of GUIs and early text editors that used [x] to close as well. Fascinating!
Work is what you do in your life every day to create value for yourself and for the people you care about. Your work should make you happy and help you to feel fulfilled. Your work could take 5 hours a week or it could take 60 hours a week. It could make you a ton of money, it could be where you spend your money. Your work could be a volunteer gig at an animal shelter that you do around your 9-5 day job, it could be the all-night code sessions you do as a hobby, it could even be what you do every day as a high-functioning cog in your office cube. It's up to you to find your own glory.
Selective enforcement has got to go. It's an infringement on all of our rights as human beings. Get rid of selective enforcement, and you get rid of ridiculous laws?
I should probably add I'm in favour of full and open access to all data. For CIA Directors and Fishmongers alike. There should be no secrets. This half-assed 'privacy for the powerful, illusions of privacy for all!' approach is obviously not working.
Privacy is an illusion, and a dangerous one. It allows dishonest people to appear honest, and further perpetuates the lie of 'normal'. It closes minds and turns us against other people who are just as human as ourselves. Privacy allows corporations selective access to our data, with the promise that it won't be misused, sold or released to those who wish to do us harm. This is a promise that no corporation can reasonably be expected to keep, if they fall under the jurisdiction of any institution greater then themselves (Like the US government). We have a lot of anxiety around people finding out our secrets, but only because we expect privacy in a world (or internet) where true privacy doesn't really exist. If you do a thing, and you do it anywhere beyond in your own mind, you have effected reality, you have changed the universe, it is public. As terrifying as that might seem.
Yeah, I'm a member of a hackerspace which is almost entirely made up of PhD's, engineers, security specialists, artists, creatives, inventors and innovators and almost all of what we do is related to fire and explosions (and electronics and art!). So yeah. Total support for this lady. I would contribute to a defense fund or college fund.
Hmm. I was under the impression that burning garbage is different in that you are burning carbon that is already in play in the carbon cycle system - unlike burning coal, which without human intervention would never be introduced into the environment at such a rapid pace. I could be wrong! I was disappointed by the lack of an explanation, or even links to background on the science of this process. Just a puff/fluff piece IMHO.
I know exactly the kind of mindset it takes to do 'experiments' like this: Clever, mischievous, inquisitive, questioning, maybe even a little defiant but not malicious. Never malicious. Authorities don't understand that knowledge and experience isn't inherently evil. If you want to prevent events like what happened in Boston, you can't do it through the policing and control of knowledge. It's impossible! I'm a girl like this girl, I had a perfect record in high school, but still (to this day!) enjoy learning about how the universe works through explosions and experiments and hands on demonstrations of half-formed understandings, because it's the best way to learn! Doing this kind of thing at school was probably a bad call. But hell, I made dry ice bombs in the football field with my physics club in 2001, and it was seriously the most fun I ever had on school property. I get this fear sometimes, a fear I call 'afraid-to-science', when I'm doing something really interesting but that could be potentially dangerous, I feel it even when I've taken all possible safety precautions, even when I know my rights, because we are all criminals sometimes if portrayed in the wrong light. If the powers-that-be decide to shine the wrong spotlight on you. Just like this girl is getting the full brunt of now...Anyway. I would also be interested in contributing to a defense fund for Kiera Wilmot. Always be learning, girl. Learning is the most worthwhile thing you can do, never stop.
Learn from other people, let people learn from you. A great way to cultivate a more fulsome understanding of a topic is to try to describe it to others, to share your understanding with others. Mentoring is like writing that way, and like writing, you can't expect to be good at it without practice. I think sharing what you know with people, people who you believe are both less and more knowledgeable than you, is incredibly beneficial to any environment (work, play, whatever). MENTOR EVERYONE!
By selecting the right candidates for the right traits (traits previously unquantifiable and untenable before Big Data techniques) these companies might eventually, in the long term, build better workers. For example, if the selection criteria for a career as a developer favours people capable of getting a Computer Science degree, then more people who want to be developers will get CS degrees. But in reality, getting a CS degree does not always equal good developer. Assume there are some people without CS degrees, but with the skills and behaviours and personality more suited to developer work. These people would be better hires. Selecting for those criteria would not only allow your company to hire better developers, but would (like selection for CS degrees) encourage emerging professionals to develop the desirable traits and skills defined by the selection criteria. (In some weird social darwinist way, that I myself am not entirely convinced of.)
I love Codecademy, like, as an addict, but it doesn't teach anyone how to make anything.
This could probably be seen as a serious problem, but not a problem with Codecademy, more of a problem with society as a whole.
Codecademy DOES provide people some of the tools they'll need to make things with computers. And another tool in the kit is always a good thing. Makes us better makers.
We can give people knowledge, we can teach them how to think, but if they don't know how to DO anything, what are they going to do with all of their ideas?
In my experience people usually just need to be enabled to become makers. Tell them "You could make a thing! A Cool thing!" and if they believe you, they'll go out and prove it.
This article is useful in that way, it might enable folks to start using whatever they do have in their toolkits to start producing. Creating value.
MOOCs combine the INCREDIBLE FREEDOM (and efficacy) of self-directed learning with the benefit of access to discipline-leading educators, scaleable web-based interactivity, and active participatory online community.
Even given all that, nothing can replace the educational value of a 5 minute meatworld conversation with someone more knowledgeable than you. Unfortunately, this does not describe 99% of university experiences. I get better (more productive) conversations at my local hackerspace than I ever did during my undergrad years. And I'm the kind of person who is not happy unless I am learning.
I'm never going back to academia because I need relevant, active learning to be an every day thing.
Academia is really only appropriate for people who want to produce original research, (and also want that research to be taken seriously.)
And that's only because we haven't figured out a better system of peer review outside of academia with sufficiently high standards of ethics, quality, credibility and adherence to scientific methods.
So yeah. Even if you don't consider the depreciating real-world value of university degrees, academia is in trouble.
IMHO if academia wants to survive it needs to take a serious look at the real, tangible value it provides society and focus on that (and only that.)
Aside: There are plenty of shitty MOOCs, plenty that don't suit my learning style, but there is also a handful of golden MOOCs that have absolutely changed my life, and shape how I view the world. The difference between a shitty MOOC and a shitty pre-requisite or required university course is that you can leave the MOOC, stop participating and learn the content elsewhere. You are never locked into an unpleasant learning experience. Shitty MOOCs will either have to get better or die. In the shitty university course, you either suffer or fail. It's not a hard choice to make, given a choice.