Most computer systems could claim that title, then. I don't know of any system, for instance, where word processing requires extensive training. (I am assuming that by "do what they want," you'd mean to exclude writing device drivers ;) At a very worst, one must convince them to type the command for the word processor, and start writing. Again, I think most systems do. It's probably just a question of degree, and doubtless there's a point beyond which you'd call a system "user friendly." You seem to treat "user friendly" as an end in itself, or perhaps it's the means to get more work from your employees? I see it as a means of using the computer to do what I want, so the "user friendly" must not get in the way of doing that. Any system where that happens, no matter how "user friendly," seems downright hostile to me. :) Also remember that "user friendly" is relative. It's a difficult matter to find a good, generic user interface. It's fine to design machines to do one thing, or a few things, and they'll do them very well if the people working on the design know what's going on. Making a generic system is more difficult. There's the matter of scope: what should the system do? There are trade-offs in simplicity vs. completeness. Many other problems arise too. I don't think anyone has ever done this perfectly, and everyone who tries has some problems. In fact, many of the problems stem from conscious design choices. I'm sure that until this hypothetical "perfect interface" appears, we will all have our preferences. This interface is not acceptable, for reason Q; this other one won't work, because it's difficult to do Z... ... but this one is "user friendly," because it does what I want it to do. What, you don't do much lambda calculus? Use it anyway, it's "user friendly!" No, there's no word processor available, but who cares... ;) Anyway, you get the point, I'm sure. For a windows user to say to somebody "windows is user-friendly, because it lets me run office apps easily" is silly, since the next person may not care a bit for office apps. I could tell that same person "windows is user hostile, because it's difficult to handle dynamic libraries, and its API is a mess." Will that matter to the user? (The answer is yes, but they don't know it, so they don't care.) It's all in what you're doing, and what you can put up with to get it done. Chris Christopher Smith, Perl Developer Amdocs - Champaign, IL /usr/bin/perl -e ' print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n"); '