The Rant That Started It All
Better living through backup tapes.
I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to go spouting off on another “I hate computers” rant this week. I got that out of my system a couple of weeks ago. “This week I’m going to be different,” I thought. “This week I’m going to be original.” And then, I started cleaning.
As I was emptying a box of crap in my basement, I came across a couple of old floppies labelled “Website.” Curious, I stuck one in a drive. I’ll be damned if I didn’t come across my old home page. No, I’m not going to show it to you. Looking at it gives me the same sort of feeling I get when seeing pictures of my old High School hairstyles. No, most of Kjell’s Happy Home Page is going to rot in the bit bucket for a bit longer yet. Most, that is, except the rant that started it all.
This is the first rant I ever posted on a web page. It was five years ago. Grunge was still cool. Microsoft was still relevant. Music still came on CDs. It was like the dark ages.
And I was still mad at computers.
Apple ][s, Software Bloat, and Productivity.
or, Why Software Sucks
Are you anxiously holding your breath waiting for Microsoft's new Office 97 to come out? I know I am. I just can't wait to see how much less productive it makes me.
I mean, c'mon. How much more productive am I now than back in the days of the Apple ][? My current computer, a Pentium 75 with a ridiculous 96 megs of RAM is thousands and thousands of times faster than my Apple ][. Think of all the wondrous things we can do with that additional processing power. Think of how much we can store in that ridiculous 96 megs of RAM. Think of how much data I can store on my gigantic 2.1 gigabyte hard drive.
I've done my thinking, and the answer is “not much.”
In the old days, I could run my integrated office suite (Appleworks) in exactly 75 kilobytes of memory. That left me 53K to hold my document. Know what? I never ran out of memory. Nowadays I have 750 times that, and I keep a swap file around, just in case that isn't enough.
In the old days, the only time I ever lost data was when I inadvertently kicked the plug out of the power bar while stretching my legs. Nowadays, my software crashes all the time—inevitably taking with it all the data since my last save. I've heard people genuinely impressed that “Windows only crashed once today.” Congratulations.
In the old days, When I wanted to analyse a trend in some data, I plugged them into a spreadsheet thought a little about the numbers, and got my answers. Nowadays I'm required to waste at least an hour getting the tables to “look good” in fourteen colours before asking the charting Wizard to generate a graph. (The rest of the day can be spent tweaking the resulting graph.)
So what—am I just some embittered Generation-Xer with an 80s fixation? (Well, yes, but that's not the point of this particular rant). What will it take to make all this fantastic technology actually make my job easier? I think the answer is to make the technology go away.
Software today has become an end in itself. Spreadsheets have thousands of pre-made charts, so it is necessary to include a chart in every document. Word Processors afford us 700 ways to change the layout of our document, so we must tweak it until we have used most of them. Presentation software exists, so we must translate every new idea and proposal into endless streams of four-bullet/one graphic Powerpoint slides.
So what do we do? Ditch software. Ditch Operating Systems. Forget this ridiculous idea that applications are entities in their own right. Turn the computer back into a tool. Let the technology fade into the background.
Or maybe I should just go back to my Apple ][…
The more things change…
kj · PDCCVXXXII, er, DXXXII
Leave a Reply
Copyright © · 2009 · 2008 · 2007 · 2006 · 2005 · 2004 · 2003 · 2002 · 2001 · 2000