On The Durability Of Usability Guidelines
Ant writes "Useit.com's Durability of Usability Guidelines article says about 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid. However, several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today... The 944 guidelines related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s; most used mainframe technology. You might think that these old findings would be completely irrelevant to today's user interface designers. If so, you'd be wrong."
Something that's a lot shorter and easier to remember and incredibly useful today (despite having been around quite a while) are Shniederman's 8 Golden Rules of UI design.
i sino/rules.html
Obligatory linkage:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/almstrum/cs370/elv
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows