Hi guys, I was recently browsing some quotes out of boredom, and saw one said by Jobs:
“The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel – one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.”
I can understand the meaning behind it but got curious about the phrase “slash q-z” as it seems not to be a common word and cannot find much about it on Google.
Edit: thanks for all the wonderful answers guys, it’s really interesting to look back see how far we’ve come from.
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Slash commands (i.e. commands that were started by typing a ‘/‘) were very typical shortcuts in word processors/spreadsheets back in the pre-GUI/command-line/DOS era of computing.
A good modern analogy would be all the memes you see in Linux/Unix-based communities these days about not being able to exit vi.
Steve Jobs was envisioning a computing world where someone could intuitively figure out how to do something “simple” like saving a file without having to read a 400-page manual that explains literally everything the software can do (most of which the majority of users will never need/want to do).
Switching from (for example) WordPerfect to MS Word back in the day was a monumental task; not only were you learning new commands, but you had to un-learn the muscle memory you had from the previous software.
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