Those who have worked with computers for many years are very happy to talk about files, programs, directories, records, spoolers, etc. The inexperienced computer user is not. We are used to the idea that when editing a document we must first load the data from disk into memory and later, when we have finished editing it, save it back onto disk. The new computer user is not.
While we are using a computer we can visualize what is going on in the computer - programs being loaded into memory, print files being written to disk before being printed, and the whole hierarchy of disks, directories and files. The user interface, for us, is a means by which we control these processes. There have been good user interfaces and bad user interfaces, but so far they have all been designed to allow the knowledgeable user to control a system he understands to some degree. Becoming proficient in the use of a personal computer meant understanding what it does internally.
With Presentation Manager and the Workplace Shell a new user can enjoy much of the function of OS/2 and its applications, without needing to understand these things. He does not even need to think of what he sees on the screen as an interface - that would imply that he is aware that there is something beyond it to which he is interfacing. What he sees on the screen is all he needs to know about. And what he sees there are representations of everyday items such as folders, documents, an alarm clock, a shredder, and printers.
These items - known as objects and represented on the screen by little images known as icons - behave in familiar ways; for example to destroy a document a user would probably guess that he had to put it through the shredder. With Workplace Shell this is almost exactly what he would do - using the mouse he would drag the icon representing the document onto the icon representing the shredder. Having discovered that, he might then guess that moving a document to a printer would cause it to be printed, or moving it onto a mailbox icon would result in its being sent to another user.
Of course, if all you could do with OS/2 Version 2.0 were the same things you could do without it, there would be no need to have a computer at all. The point is, of course, that though the objects with which the OS/2 user works do familiar things in familiar ways, they also have capabilities far beyond their real-life counterparts. Consider, for example:
(This would be the Workplace Shell equivalent of a word-processor with a
spellcheck function - the difference is that the user need not know of the
existence of any word-processing package; to him, the spell-checking capability
is a characteristic of the document itself. This is the essential difference
between object-oriented and application-oriented interfaces.)
OS/2's Workplace Shell can do all this and, moreover, do it in a way that the inexperienced user will find a straightforward and natural extension to the real-life behavior of the objects concerned. Furthermore, the Workplace Shell allows application developers to extend the range of objects available to the user to include many more sophisticated or specialized types than those provided as standard with OS/2.