User interfaces are teachers as well as servants. I once worked in an office doing IT support. It was just after the release of the IBM Personal Computer, and a pool of typists was using EasyWriter II to prepare transcriptions of workshop presentations. The year was 1982. There were no hard disks, but these transcribers were thoroughly equipped with all of the contemporary tools needed for their work.

Not one but TWO diskette drives allowed both operating system and word processor to remain in drive A while the documents could be stored in drive B—a huge improvement over the less expensive systems that required constant swapping. Users simply inserted the master disk—amusingly labeled “DOS Boot”—into the left-hand drive and turned on the computer. In addition, all machines were stocked with the full complement of RAM—64K bytes—that DOS 1.1 was capable of supporting. Finally, all transcribers had a dictation device with a foot pedal, allowing them to play, transcribe, rewind, and replay the recorded audio.

In other words, it was a top-of-the-line operation. No expense was spared.

The typists were still drawing on IBM Selectric skills, and word processing was a bit new to them. But they were learning quickly, and it was one of the most productive environments that I’ve ever worked in. Each transcriber was able to generate the equivalent of a full-length book every few days. No local area networks, and so no shared peripherals, they each had a printer, so intermediate drafts could come easily.

One typist—I’ll call her Laura—was working on a document that had a lot of repetition in it. Similar tables and text kept reappearing, with only minor changes that made progressively detailed points. I watched her with interest as she worked.

At first, Laura would scroll backwards to a previous page, observe the text, and then return to the current working page to enter as much data as she could remember. But then it occurred to her that she could print the previous page. Remember that she’s a touch typist. Retyping something from a printed page is an easy and frequent activity. So she would print the page and then put it on her viewing stand to retype. No more scrolling back and forth. She was gratified that this solution was much more productive, and continued in this way for some time.

After two or three repetitions of this behavior, I intervened. “Laura, I see that you’re entering repetitive information. Can I show you a trick?” I taught her how to highlight a block of text, select it, and then copy it to a new place in the document. This “block copy and paste” feature was revolutionary, and Laura eagerly mastered the technique. Later she taught all of her officemates how to do it as well. The newly-copied text could then be individually edited, and Laura found the feature to be much more productive than the printing and retyping technique that she had invented as a solution to her problem.