Amongst a few gems, the stand-out pitch was ‘Write about some­thing Retro’, because, as I’m sure you’re aware, there is a big ‘Retro’ trend hap­pen­ing right now (if you didn’t know, now you’ll be able to talk con­fi­dently about it with your col­leagues safe it the knowl­edge that it’s bang on trend).

Pon­der­ing the idea of ‘retro’, I perused my book­shelves in search of inspi­ra­tion. It was there that I stum­bled across an orig­i­nal 1986 instruc­tion man­ual for ‘Side­kick’ pro­duced by Bor­land (who, I’m glad to report are still trad­ing at Borland.com).

‘Side­kick’ was the first piece of Desk­top soft­ware that I owned. 1987 was the year I pur­chased it. In retro terms, that equates to the orig­i­nal year for the Rubix Cube, ‘With­nail and I’, ‘Dirty Danc­ing’ and Acid House smileys..

Why I kept the man­ual I don’t know, cer­tainly the com­puter and asso­ci­ated floppy disks were long con­signed to the tip. But, as I flicked through the man­ual it occurred to me that it pro­vided an inter­est­ing bench­mark to show how far things have come in the space of a rel­a­tively small num­ber of years, not in terms of the Inter­net per-se but how we inter­act with soft­ware and the notion of user experience.

Installing the soft­ware was akin to enter­ing a dark­ened room and stay­ing there, alone, for sev­eral hours. There were 14 diskettes that needed to be loaded in sequence, each tak­ing min­utes to load, the process accom­pa­nied by whirring and chirrup­ing as the disks were read. Fraught with fear, in case the disks were loaded in the incor­rect order or the final sum­ma­tion, once the process was com­plete, indi­cated that there was a ‘disk error’ and the whole process would need to be repeated.

The Side­kick Man­ual came at an inter­est­ing time, as users were trend­ing away from being home-based pro­gram­mers, to peo­ple who just wanted to write, cal­cu­late or do some other task with­out hav­ing to under­stand how to write Basic. The man­ual tries to bridge this gap, and offers tan­ta­lis­ing con­tent such as it’s descrip­tion of one of the basic cal­cu­la­tor fea­ture ‘This is a nor­mal, every­day busi­ness pocket calculator…However, it also offers spe­cial fea­tures for pro­gram­mers’. Oh, how I wanted to unlock those spe­cial features!

Chap­ter 1 of the man­ual ‘Get­ting started’ has five pages of con­tent before you reach the mile­stone of ‘Finally – start Side­kick’. The next Chap­ter is about tak­ing your ‘Side­kick for a Ride’, detail­ing how to open up the Notepad, and using the short­cut keys. One of the fea­tures pro­filed is the F4 ‘Import Data from screen’ which is described as ‘a very excit­ing fea­ture; it allows you to take text from the screen and put it into the NotePad! When you ht F4, the Notepad dis­ap­pears, but don’t be afraid, it will come back’. Sadly the re-assuring tone failed to reduce my anx­i­ety lev­els when using the fea­ture, although the notion of ‘copy and paste’ is per­haps one of the most com­mon util­i­ties we now take for granted.

The friendly, per­son­able tone extends through­out the man­ual. Includ­ing the Cal­en­dar descrip­tion which offers the per­haps overly opti­mistic text, that once you’ve opened the appli­ca­tion ‘You may now move through time’.

From a UX per­spec­tive, one of the inter­est­ing facets of Side­kick was the use of func­tion keys, which were deployed for every con­ceiv­able func­tion. The rea­son being that the Mouse still wasn’t the preva­lent form of Com­puter Human Inter­ac­tion at that point (that didn’t really hap­pen until the late 80′s) so there was no easy way to con­trol the on-screen nav­i­ga­tion, so instead the user had to jump up and down the screen and call dif­fer­ent util­i­ties by a mind-boggling array of func­tion and CTRL keys, often requir­ing three or more keys to be depressed simul­ta­ne­ously, in a Twister-style approach to key­board interaction.

Hard­ware notwith­stand­ing, the man­ual is inter­est­ing in its use of a ‘human’ tone to try and reas­sure users that the soft­ware was their friend and not some­thing to be fear­ful of. Sup­port­ing this, the man­ual pro­vides ‘Scenes from our lives‘ where Bor­land pro­gram­mers write about typ­i­cal behav­iours and how Side­kick can help, gen­er­ally by being by being faster and more effi­cient. This notion of putting the cus­tomer at the heart of the expe­ri­ence is cen­tral to the deliv­ery of a good UX today, as is the approach of deliv­er­ing appli­ca­tions that are intu­itive for peo­ple to under­stand and apply.

The Side­kick Man­ual came with a pre-paid card slip for users to send their details back to Bor­land for mar­ket­ing pur­poses. The form is styled to make it almost impos­si­ble to read due to minus­cule text, and requir­ing pro­gram­mer level knowl­edge of your hard­ware, ask­ing for details such as your PC’s CPU and whether you had EMS/EEMS Mem­ory or a Math coproces­sor. But you can see where Bor­land were going, iden­ti­fy­ing their cus­tomers and seg­ment­ing them based upon their attrib­utes, pre­sum­ably with a plan to send them tar­geted mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial or to iden­tify trends in their cus­tomer base to guide future prod­uct development.

It’s been 27 years since I pur­chased Side­kick, but it’s pos­si­ble to see a direct cor­re­la­tion between that soft­ware man­ual and today’s web appli­ca­tions, per­haps not in terms of the tech­nol­ogy per-se but in the sense of com­mu­ni­cat­ing a friendly, help­ful expe­ri­ence, that’s intu­itive and built by peo­ple who want to make your life eas­ier. The side­kick man­ual, to me, evokes that sense of bushy pro­gram­mers, sit­ting in a sunny Cal­i­forn­ian busi­ness park, akin to an early Steve Jobs, exud­ing hope. Want­ing to make a dif­fer­ence to soci­ety and recog­nis­ing that they could do it via cod­ing, and by com­mu­ni­cat­ing to their users in human terms that were both rel­e­vant and contextual.

Why ‘Ready Player One’ as the title to this blog? Well, for ref­er­ence, this is the title of a thump­ing retro Sci-Fi novel, based on early arcade games (espe­cially the 80′s) that have this title as the ‘Call to action’.