Success Quote by Bill Budge

A surprisingly tender demand hides inside Budge's blunt, engineering-flavored sentence: the machine should notice you. Not just your inputs, but your presence, your hesitations, your competence. In the early grammar of computing, users were often treated as noisy peripherals - press a key, get a response. Budge is arguing for something more intimate and, in its way, more radical: software that reads the room.

The specificity of "keyboard or joystick" pins this to the moment when computers were migrating from offices and labs into living rooms and arcades, when play became a serious interface problem. A joystick implies speed, reflex, stakes; "idle" implies attention drifting, a body leaving the scene, a game waiting with no idea whether it's being abandoned or merely paused. Budge is pushing toward programs that can modulate themselves in real time: ramp difficulty, adjust pacing, offer instruction without insult, stop wasting cycles when no one is there.

The subtext is business as much as benevolence. A program that can distinguish novice from expert is a program that keeps both kinds of customers. It lowers the friction for newcomers while preserving mastery for the initiated - the core loop of retention before anyone used the word. There's also a quiet assertion of respect: proficiency is a variable worth recognizing, not flattening.

Read now, it sounds like a prehistory of personalization and adaptive systems, with an unspoken warning. The more software "knows" about you, the more it can serve you - and steer you.