zlacker

>>sohkam+(OP)
That's an early version of the system. I've seen pictures of a later version, which was an IBM 3270 display with a phone handset, but no keyboard. The idea was that the executive would pick up the phone and be connected to someone in a call center who would then do spreadsheet-type operations for them. Don't know if that was deployed much.

>>Animat+V4
Very prescient! That's pretty much how my execs work with MS Teams and my Excel models - they call me and I manipulate them on the screen for them :-D

>>snthpy+ra
In the early 1990s, I was working on GUI email software. Not much different than the email software at university, just the pixel resolution was higher with GUI.

The dev team went out "into the field" to help roll out the software to the company. This also allowed us to see how others used the software.

At the end of the day, one of the devs reported back that one personal assistant would maximize the email app's window (back when 17" CRT monitors were large) and after each email was processed, she'd print out the email and file it the appropriate spot in a filing cabinet.

All the devs were, "But... But... she can just file the email in an email folder in the program. Why does she need hardcopy? Email was supposed to save trees!"

>>canuck+Qh
Right after graduating college my wife was looking for work and ended up taking a job as a secretary shared between two chairs at our local university. They thought it was super important that their secretary had a bachelors degree for some reason.

One of the chairs would read emails on his iMac, then would handwrite a return message and give it to my wife who would type it into email and send it as him. He didn’t want to type anything. This was around 2008 to give you an idea of timing. My wife didn’t stay for long, but my understanding is he was doing this until he retired sometime in the 20 teens.

>>a2tech+UC
2008. Wow.

But I do remember going back to the 90s that there was at least one senior exec at a computer company I worked for who basically didn't touch his terminal as I understand it. His admin printed out and typed everything.

>>ghaff+kQ
This attitude is still presenet among doctors, and is one reason why electronic Medical Records still suck, and why Obama's "Affordable Care Act" has made American healthcare simultaneously the most expensive in the world as well as among the worst in the world. Doctors consider their time too valuable to be used in slow and fiddly data entry, so they offload it to additional staff.

They're not entirely wrong in this regard - modern EMR web UIs are arguably inferior in many ways to some light pen driven systems of the 1970s-80s (I'm thinking especially of the old TDS system, which nurses (and the few docs that used them) loved because it was so easy and quick - replacing or "upgrading" it was like pulling teeth, and the nurses fought hard to keep it in every case I ever saw.)

>>dublin+mb1
Physician time is valuable. There is essentially a fixed supply and other bottlenecks in the healthcare system make adding more doctors a very slow process. That's why forward-thinking health systems employ medical scribes to offload data entry.

https://www.scribeamerica.com/what-is-a-medical-scribe/

The TDS Health Care System had some unique advantages but unfortunately it was tied to obsolete technology and ultimately a dead end. Web UIs aren't necessarily a problem. Some of the most popular EHRs such as Epic use native thick client applications. The fundamental issue is that healthcare is inherently more complex than almost any other business domain, with every medical specialty needing a different workflow plus beyond the clinical stuff there are extensive documentation requirements imposed by payers and government regulators. Sometimes clinicians and administrators insist on certain functionality even when it makes no sense due to ego or ignorance. EHRs can be improved but I know from painful experience how expensive and time consuming it is to get everything right.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/89482.89511