Impressed by the low price of the Osborne 1, I gave the little keyboard every benefit of the doubt. And yet, even after several hours, I simply could not adjust. “Just a matter of operator retraining” was how one saleswoman put it after I complained that I kept hitting the return when I wanted a quote mark. And yet I wasn’t about to gamble $1,800 on a machine with a keyboard I might forever hate. Ergonomically, I had an advantage: I was buying just for myself. But a selection committee, made up of different kinds of prospective users—clerks and executives alike—is the next best thing to a lone customer shopping with only himself in mind.
Avoiding the HAL syndrome, your committee should consider, among other things, the following:
THE SCREEN
For heavy-duty viewing, a terminal or computer should have at least a nine-inch screen and ideally a twelve incher. I emphasize the words “heavy-duty.” An executive using a terminal half an hour a week obviously has needs different from a clerk doing tedious data-entry work most of the day. Even the executive, however, should have a screen big enough for unexpectedly long sessions in front of the tube. On the other hand, suppose a bank teller must view just a few columns of numbers every now and then; he may never need a screen bigger than a few inches. Too large a screen, in fact, even in heavy-duty work, may expose one to glary reflections.
Size preferences can be quirky. I’ll make do for the moment with the Kaypro’s nine inches, but I wouldn’t mind a bigger screen; another writer once said he’d like to hook up the same model to a twenty-one-inch monitor.
The next basic is the color. The two sexes have somewhat different tastes. Men, says John van Raalte, an RCA scientist, are less sensitive to colors in the reddish-orange range than are women. That doesn’t mean, however, that, as a rule, women should automatically have reddish-orange monitors. For men and women the optimum range of light sensitivity is usually amber or green. Comfort is high in those ranges, too, at least for most people.[[38]]
Amber screens are popular in Europe, where one study showed a lower error rate compared to green and other statistics said more users liked amber.
American computer magazines have breathlessly praised amber. It’s as if they were fashion publications thrilled by the latest from abroad. But some U.S. experts question the controls in at least one proamber study—for example, the number of volunteers, fewer than two dozen. And Bruce Rupp of IBM points out that it’s harder to produce a steady, flickerless image with amber than with green. What’s more, an executive with a company planning to sell amber terminals said screens of that color burned out faster than did green ones.
Meanwhile, NIOSH says dark characters against a stable white background are especially promising; and Etienne Grandjean, a leading ergonomist with many admirers in the labor movement here and in Europe, agrees.
Perhaps there’s a less jarring transition when your eyes move between the screen and the printed material you may be working with. It sounds logical enough, and in fact that’s what the Macintosh and many other computers use. That’s also the display style I saw in the Newspaper Guild offices in Washington.