ArcView 1.0 Part 2

If you didn't read Part 1, you should. If you did and don't remember, here's the summary of it: there's been a couple of posts about ArcView 1.0. I ran across some floppys - I decided to try an experiment - It failed - I had an another idea - try the same on an older computer - and here's the story.

With a little time on my hands, I decided to take the harddrive that I had installed Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and ArcView 1.0 on and move it from my Athlon 1.4GHz to the young kid's Pentium Pro 180mHz/6MB (which they have even abandoned because nothing runs on it anymore). I then booted it up. I found it shocking that I did not have any 'installing new drivers' boxes come up, but then again this is 'old' technology. I immediately tried AV1. It worked!

Here's a screen photo of one of the tutorials-

Here's the 'About' screen (I like the 'dismiss' button - who is Michael & Jeff?)
As far as usability goes -- it was really lacking. It's very different from ArcView 2/3, and goes without saying completely foreign to an ArcGIS 8/9 user. For example, none of the icons on the tool bars are 'standard'. Its hard to describe - but the Zoom tool is a fixed zoom in tool, the zoom by rectangle tool looks like a select by rectangle tool, etc. One of the things I did find surprising was that there were measure tools for a line, rectangle, and circle - only the line tool exists as a standard tool nowdays. I wonder why?
The speed of the software was very quick - keep in mind its running on a 180mHz PC. However, the general usability still made it hard to use. The various menus, 'layer property' pages, etc. all were far inferior to ArcView 2 & 3.x let alone 8 & 9.x . It would be difficult to produce a publication quality map in AV1 or conduct any type of spatial analysis. And last, it just uses coverages, no shapefiles.

The difference between AV1 and AV2 is much greater than the difference between AV3 and AV8. I cannot believe that AV1 was GIS for the masses, I wasn't that friendly. 15 years latter, I think its still up for grabs on what GIS for the masses is.