640K Really Was Enough After All
By Carrington Vanston // 2004 Jan 28
The Macintosh computer turned twenty years old this week. I'm a fan of Macs, if only because they let me feel smugly superior when I talk to Windows users. That, plus I've noticed the good guys use Macs in movies while the bad guys use PCs, and I know what color my cowboy hat is.
But while I adore Mac OS X and all it's never-crash, no-virus, fast-as-hell goodness...I can't help but notice we've not come a long way, baby. For all their big LCD screens and nineteen button mice, today's computers are not so very different from what we were using 20 years ago.
Two decades ago we had mouse-driven computers with graphical user interfaces and sufficient computing power to offer us word processors for creative writing and homework, spreadsheets and databases for number crunching and records keeping, graphics programs we could use to make posters and newsletters, and tons of addictive games to keep us from actually doing any of that other stuff.
It was only a couple years later that computers had multitasking so we could share data easily between applications, high resolution printers for quality output of our work, hard drives to store thousands of our digital documents, and of course even more addictive games which still kept us from getting that other stuff done.
Lode Runner was single-handedly responsible for depriving the world of more great novels than anything else this century.
In the past twenty-plus years of bigger and bigger bits and bytes what have we really gained? Our hard drives now have massive platters capable of storing millions of those old documents--but we can't really store more documents than before because our old 4K word processing files have ballooned to two thousand times the size of the actual text we type.
As far as I'm concerned the last great leap forward for computers came in 1983 with the introduction of lowercase letters.
In 1980 I had an Apple ][+ computer that could execute about three hundred thousand instructions a second (it was a 1 MHz computer, but it took multiple cycles to perform one instruction).
I'm typing this article on a computer that can perform well over a billion instructions per second. So my current computer is almost four thousand times faster than that old Apple box...but I don't write any faster on it. I can't say that I actually find my documents any faster on my dual-processor Power Macintosh than I did on that 1MHz computer. I can't say that my writing has improved thanks to the addition of equation editors and the other new so-called features in modern word processors. In fact, the auto-formatting and other nonsense actually slows me down since I have to fight to keep my text intact, so I now write using a plain text editor with fewer features than the software I used back in the days of skinny ties and parachute pants.
I know I must sound like one of those old "when I was a kid we had to walk to school in the snow every day, uphill both ways, without shoes, or socks, or pants, but dammit we wuz happy!" fellows. But the truth is I had spell checkers and WYSIWYG displays and e-mail more than two decades ago, and my basic computing productivity has been little improved by buying a few dozen computers for more than a few dozen thousand dollars.
As far as I'm concerned the last great leap forward for computers came in 1983 with the introduction of lowercase letters. Except the letter J, which for some reason didn't come along until Spring of '86. We've been coasting ever since.
My eyesight might have benefited from my big LCD screen, but not my diction. The only thing that's really new is the world wide web. So chalk one up for porn, but there goes the benefit to my eyesight.
So what's my computer doing with this four-hundredfold increase in processing power? It's showing off. The icons are bigger, the windows slide around the screen, and everything generally pulses or rotates or shimmies or dances an ancient Phoenician mating dance when my mouse even comes near it. There's ear candy, too. Things beep or whistle or clang or croon when they're clicked. Or sometimes just because they feel they've been ignored to long.
In short, my computer has gone from being a fancy typewriter that made disturbing grinding noises when I saved files on big actually-floppy floppy disks, to a fancy typewriter that yells "yoo hoo!" at me repeatedly while I'm working and then tries to sell me something to enlarge my penis.
Twenty years has not given me a computer that makes me a better writer. It's given me a computer that's starved for attention. It's given me dancing paperclips and flashing advertisements. It's given me fifteen different ways to access the ten commands I actually need, but it's buried them among a hundred menu items I ignore.
And porn. It's given me a whole helluva lot of porn along with the blinking lights and sound effects. Just a bunch of flashing and bleeping however you look at it, which makes redundant all that "add inches now!" spam since as far as I can tell the sole purpose of the internet is to enlarge my penis, however temporarily.
With all this sound and fury in computerland I can't help but suspect I'm being intentionally distracted from something. And I think that something might be the fact that I keep buying new computers whose sole purpose is to distract me from the fact that I keep buying new computers whose sole purpose is to distract me from...and so forth.
At what point do our word processors not need a new feature that has nothing to do with the actual act of writing something? At what point do our spreadsheets not need one more way to graph a simple series of numbers?
At what point do we not accept the idea that fixing the errors in our software requires that we pay for a new version which only runs on a faster computer? At what point do we not accept the idea that our new faster computer is slowed down by all the useless features and errors in our software?
And at what point do we say to ourselves, we have reached the point where we do not require any more pornography?
I bet you were with me until that last bit.
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Carrington Vanston is a humorist and atheist. Or vice versa. He wrote and directed the long forthcoming feature film Duck Duck Goose. He has written two tiny plays which had two tiny productions: The Sound Of Two Hands Typing and Stark Raving Happy. He speaks three languages fluently, but two of them are English with a silly accent. The third is English with a slightly less silly accent. He can pronounce his full name backwards, he has a favorite mathematical equation, and he wants that $2 you owe him. Carrington should be stored in a cool, dry place, and may explode if heated.