It's Not a Computer

Written by Jamie Tuesday, 27 December 2011 10:19

Back in the day we had big computers, expensive things, and users took turns with them. For example, users – you could call them programmers – would gather their ideas on punch cards, patiently wait their turn, feed the cards into the computer and wait for the results. This time share may same strange to us, old fashioned, yet I’ve seen this pattern twice in my own lifetime. Firstly, Brendan, my brother, and I shared a Commodore 64. Our programs, collected on tapes this time, could only be fed into the machine one at a time. Secondly, as a student in Edinburgh, I shared a super computer with other students in exactly the same manner. 

The big computer, clearly an operational risk is you only had one of them, eventually got duplicated. As our ability to produce computers got better, we saw a trend towards what was called the mini. Here’s the PD7:



Now, you may be thinking that this mini is not very mini, but it was compared to the other multi-user computers at the time. At one point, as the price of networking came down (and I imagine the scheduling software got better), the minis were replaced by dumb-terminals. A dumb-terminal, such as a cash machine on the high-street, is typified by a simple user interface and its connection, via a network, to a computer in a different location (sometimes it was a different room - the computer room).

Of course, at one point, as the cost of hardware came down and users got more demanding, the dumb-terminals started to get a bit smarter. Computing power was moved into the machine and the end-user-programmer was born. Everyone could run programs locally, and so scientists could run their simulations, bankers could print their reports and the Brendan and I could play our games.

Ah! Bliss. But then these damn scientists wanted to share things. Share them! God forbid. They piggy-backed on the TCP network protocol and invented – that’s a bit cruel to other inventions – they invented HTTP, a simple transfer protocol, and they used HTML, a mark-up language that contained both data and meta-data. All that was needed was a way to present the HTML document so that the end user could read it. The application for presenting HTML is now known as a browser.

What does this mean? Well, the document was on another computer. The browser was computationally cheap to execute. Therefore, these great computers we had on our desktops, for a vast majority of users, were reduced to dumb-terminals. That, they said, was progress.

Other dumb terminals arrived. The iPhone, tablets, computationally weak machines just for browsing. Etc. And, just as before, the users got greedy. These are my own recollections of user greed, one from a while back and one from yesterday.

Mike had gotten an iPhone a few years ago. He could look at pictures, browse (of course), read his mail and use a calculator. I said, switch back to the browser. But his dumb-terminal couldn’t multi-task. In fact, this amazing device was not defined by what it could do but rather by what it couldn’t do. What’s happened since then? Well, what’s happened since then was exactly what happened in the 80s. Computer power is cheaper, the user is greedy, and so these dumb-terminals are now not so dumb. You can multi-task on the new iPhone, you can run local applications that utilize the device’s power, and, the best applications, use both the local processor and larger computers up there in the ‘cloud’. (What a stupid name, the cloud.  When I logged into Hull University's computers to check my mail, I was not logging into the cloud, I was just logging in.)

User greed happened to me yesterday. I bought a television as a family Christmas present. I turned it on. It was internet ready! Brilliant. But there is no keyboard. Only the remote control. (I downloaded a virtual keyboard/tracker for my smartphone which goes someway to solving the TV’s user interface problems.) Then I navigated, via the browser, to the my favourite sports site. Streaming doesn’t work. Ah! I’ll just download Chrome or Firefox, I thought. But you can’t change the system browser. Later I tried the YouTube application. Rubbish. Took me two minutes to type in ‘Lady Chatterley Episode 1’.

Therefore, my TV, one centimeter thick, with its mind-blowing, high-definition display, is not amazing me by what it can do, it’s just pissing me off for what it can’t do. My partner said to me exactly what Mike said to me all those years ago, ‘but it’s not a computer’. What they meant to say was, it is a computer, but it’s just an absolutely shite computer.

The cycle will continue.  The cost of hardware will come down, the TV manufacturers will listen to us greedy users, and the next wave will be fixed. My final thought, something I tell all my customers, is this: there are no television, phone or automobile manufacturers left. There are only software companies left, it’s just that some of them have side-lines in selling televisions, phones or automobiles...