Computing Evolution

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Brian Fahrlander
<wheeldweller at gmail.com> wrote:
>    I was having breakfast this morning, remembering some of the work
> I'd done. I remembered the day Kevin Carter of Turner Beverages
> (Huntsville, AL) charged me with buying a new 20M hard drive- an
> ST-225.  I drove like it was nitro; it cost $600!  A year or two later I
> learned that it takes a great deal more than that to hurt an ST-225.
>
>    But it crossed my mind that neither Windows nor Ubuntu would even
> distribute on this drive anymore, much less run. The 64K static RAM
> boards that started my career off are less than a stack pointer on
> modern systems these days. I've been told the 'sweet spot' on Vista is
> at about 4G of RAM, and of course many, many gigs of drive space.
>
>    Here's the key: We keep moving up in capabilities (larger memory,
> faster parts, etc) but we don't solve more complex problems....

You've gotten some great feedback, but I thought I'd reply in a
different direction.

I recently cleaned out my floppies and decided I'd install Windows
3.11 onto a VM while I still had a computer capable of reading the
disks. I allocated 32M of ram and installed Windows, MS Office 4.1 and
all of my other software from that era.

To my amazement the system booted dos, windows and even loaded the MOM
(office toolbar / quick launcher) in about 20 seconds. Compared to
Ubuntu, Vista or XP it was like lightening.

I thought i'd try doing normal productivity tasks to see what I could
accomplish. To my amazement, normal business tasks were easily
accomplished. I installed Netscape 4 and was able to view email,
search Google and surf the web, though most websites were horribly
broken with this generation browser.

So what have we accomplished? With faster computers, more storage,
gigs of ram... a lot actually:

 1. Computers have gotten cheaper. When I bought my 486 I found about
the cheapest computer you could get, it was about $2,000 USD. Now a
computer 100x more powerful can be had for a little over half that
price. And you can now get a mobile computer new for under $300 USD.

 2. Programmer productivity. I dabble in micro-controller programming
and it's quite exciting to optimize applications to run on limited
hardware. It makes me a better programmer, but to be honest, I really
don't benefit a lot from the optimization steps in my normal day to
day code. Cutting an application request from 80ms to 40ms on paper
seems like a big win but in reality no one notices. I can skip most of
the time consuming computer science and get a lot more done using
modern development tools.

 3. Smarter user interfaces. The user interfaces are so much smarter
now that people with little to no computer experience can learn how to
use a new application or a new computer or even their first computer
in a fraction of the time of the "good ol' days."

 4. Some things just weren't possible. Have you ever had to say "no"
to a request from a PHB that seemed insane? I remember telling a user
they couldn't implement a feature because it would make the homepage
of their website 60k. Our goal was 25k and our max homepage size was
40k. If you went to a web firm now and told them to make a homepage
but it had to be about 25k they'd say, "sure, we can make you a nice
homepage for $25,000 dollars. Wait, you mean 25 KB? <hysterical
laughter>" We have to constantly re-evaluate what we can and can't do
because the limits keep changing.

And finally, I have to keep this in my mind constantly. As a web
developer (my job) it's probably one of the most important
philosophical points relevant to my work.

The reason computers on the surface haven't changed fundamentally is
because people's needs haven't changed fundamentally. Bill Gates said
more than 10 years ago that people need to communicate and be
entertained, but they don't need to compute. This is a very insightful
statement and it explains why facebook and twitter and WOW are so
popular. It's why your mobile phone is your next computer and those
software developers who aren't planning for the world of mobile
computing are going to be the butt of the jokes we're currently making
about COBOL programmers.

And we ARE seeing some changes to computing at a fundamental level
with things like T9, the iPhone, cell phones that use Morse code so
that people can know who is calling them without actually looking at
their phone. How far fetched does it sound to have a blue tooth
headset paired to a web enabled mobile phone with GPS that uses Google
Voice Search to guide you to the location of a client's office? Not
far-fetched at all, yet when you think about it, doesn't it sound just
like something from star trek?

My point? A lot has changed, though at a casual glance it may not seem like it.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter