[CartyBoston]

The first two machines I touched were a CDC 6400 and DEC 20 at Lehigh University in the 70s.

Both - while built by large teams - "felt" like they were designed by a single person, complete consistency across hw, OS, tools, and apps (programs). It's so foreign from the experience we have now it's difficult for me to describe.

[borlanco]

You noticed the conceptual integrity of the systems, as described by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month.

From Chapter 4:

> "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas."

> "Because ease of use is the purpose, this ratio of function to conceptual complexity is the ultimate test of system design. Neither function alone nor simplicity alone defines a good design. This point is widely misunderstood."

> "All my own experience convinces me, and I have tried to show, that the conceptual integrity of a system determines its ease of use. Good features and ideas that do not integrate with a system's basic concepts are best left out. If there appear many such important but incompatible ideas, one scraps the whole system and starts again on an integrated system with different basic concepts."