I use my computer off and on all day. I am interested in what people know about computers and how they learned .
Clearly, computers and offshoots like smartphones and tablets are affected by designing, by attempts to build an appearance and layout that makes function somewhat clear. Also, labels on keys and buttons certainly help make clear what does what.
The basic idea of a pressable button or switch with a given function is clear and fundamental. Some buttons have multiple uses, as when the button makes something different happen if it is pressed twice rapidly. In some cases, if I press a button while holding a different one down, the button I press performs differently.
It can seem that a good way to start is to decide or learn what the learner thinks he would like to have the computer do. In many situations, that is indeed basic but sometimes the learner wants to get a better understanding of what the machine is built to do, first. I had already used computers and written programs for them to follow before I had a computer in my house, one that I owned. My first conscious use involved sitting at a card punch machine to make a deck of cards with one instruction per card and holes punched into the body of the card that the computer used to read its tasks. I never saw the machine, which was run by a special operator. He placed my deck in a chute, the mechanism brought the cards into itself and fanned through them one at a time, reading and executing the instructions right along. That was in 1966, in graduate school.
It wasn't until 1984, nearly 20 years later, that a "home" computer was available at a price I could afford. I thought and thought about whether I wanted to buy an Apple IIe or an IBM Personal Computer ("PC"). There were other brands and models, such as Radio Shack and Commodore. I saw an ad contrasting the writer's and artist's depiction of the "spirit" of Apple and International Business Machines (IBM) and decided I liked Apple. We bought a machine, small and fairly easy to carry, but our computing got a huge boost with the Appleworks software package. It consisted of a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database.
That was software ready to go and that performed very useful functions. Typing in various sizes and forms of print, doing basic math and keeping information such as names and addresses were just the jobs I wanted help with. Those same basic tasks are available as Google programs today. There is something of a parallel with people today learning to use a smartphone.
