conspiracy-theories dept.
If you haven't ever played Solitaire, Minesweeper, Hearts or FreeCell, it's safe to say you're in the minority. These simple Windows games have probably caused more lost worker hours than anything short of a worldwide coffee shortage. Whichever one was your favorite, the temptation to take just one more go at beating them—to get a faster time or a better score—was hard to ignore.
But as fun as these games were, they weren't actually designed for entertainment. At least not in their Windows incarnations.
The oldest of the four, Microsoft Solitaire, was first added to Windows 3.0 in 1990. Although the game (sometimes called "Patience") has existed since the late 1700s, this digital version seemed to be demonstrating that in the future we would no longer require a physical deck to play simple card games. But that's not what it was doing at all. Its real aim was far more modest: it was teaching mouse-fluency by stealth.
The intention was that Solitaire would get a generation of computer users still most familiar with a command-line input to teach themselves how to drag and drop, without realizing that's what they were doing. The fact that we're still dragging and dropping today suggests that it worked rather well.
It is highly probable that SN members were aware of the true purpose of these games but the article seemed interesting nevertheless.
(Score: 1) by ThePhilips on Monday August 17 2015, @07:38AM
The story IMO is largely a fairy tale, since Solitaire had also fully supported keyboard. One could play the game without the mouse. Few computers back then were even shipped with the mice. (Mice craze IIRC hasn't started till Win95 came out.)
But yes, the computer games in general served the purpose of advancing people's motor skills with the "pointing devices", which helped them greatly to adopt to the new UI paradigms.
Anyway, for consumers, the mouse is/was just a stopgap measure, till we had the touchscreens. 20 years ago, I actually used to explain the mouse to the new users as a devices which allows you literally point at something on the screen, point and touch it, as if with the finger.