Whither Are We Drifting?
An essay originally published in January 1996 during a shutdown of the federal government
by Leonard Grossman
"Think about the future," the editor said. But nothing came
to mind. Then I thought about the immortal words of Maynard G.
Krebs, who, when asked to write an essay entitled "Whither are We
Drifting?" as a high school assignment, responded, "I don't
know." (Krebs was a "beatnik" character on the 50's t.v. show,
"Dobie Gillis." If you were born on the cusp of the baby boom you
will remember.) Krebs got an "A."
Even though Congress has granted me excessive time to think
about this and other weighty matters, I don't know either.
Whether we are talking about the online world or computers in
general, this is a period of flux. Patterns and trends are hazy.
For more than 20 years I have attended the same New Years
Eve, party. For the last half dozen, I have swapped computer
stories all night. It was after midnight when I realized the
subject hadn't even come up. Finally about 1:00 a.m. one of my
once a year friends asked, as he always does: "What new toys did
you get this year." I realized there was nothing exciting. Oh
yes, during 1995 I did add a few meg of RAM to the pawn shop
special and I convinced NEC to replace my single speed CD ROM
with an upgrade, but other than that nothing much. (I'm not
counting that tape backup I so desperately had to have and which
stares at me from its bay inducing guilt but not prompting me to
take action).
But even if I had made a major upgrade, would it be that
exciting. Yes, things would be faster...and I have recently
begun to d/l shareware which snootily informs we that it requires
a 486 when I try to install it. But there is nothing I need to
do that I can't do right now. In the face of the federal shut
down, and the payless furloughs expected when we do get back to
work, I can't really justify any major expenditures at the
moment.
At a meeting of NICOL (The Northern Illinois Computer Owners
League, the first week of January, about 25 to 30% of the members
were using Windows 95. More anticipated moving over in the near
future but a few, like me, had already deleted it from their
systems. The trend seems to be reluctant acceptance of Win95,
not enthusiasm.
We did watch a demo of Word Pro from Lotus run under WIN95
on a blistering IBM ThinkPad, and projected overhead. Even on
this P150 or whatever it was with 20 meg of RAM, things seemed
slow to me. (But then I quite happily compose on Word Perfect
5.1 for DOS. If I need to do something fancy I import the file
in WPWIN and slog on from there. Most of what I write, aside
from legal documents when the government is open, gets
transported to editors, each of whom publishes in a different
format. Nothing beats ASCII for this purpose. That way everyone
can use my stuff and I don't have to remember the preferred
format of each publisher. Why compose in Windows fonts if I am
going to save it in ASCII in the end?) The demonstrator did
point out that the default is now to single space rather than
double space after a period. "Sez Who?", we wanted to know.
There was no answer. One mavin suggested that the difference was
because Word Processing with proportional spacing is more like
print than type, but who knows.
Word Pro does offer some exciting features, but Lotus (IBM)
seems to be risking the same fate that hit Word Perfect. The new
app makes significant changes in the interface. Whether Ami Pro
fans will find it worth while to learn a new app, and if so
whether the one they choose will be Word Pro, is an open
question.
The most fascinating thing about the demo was the opening
WIN95 screen. After complimenting the demonstrator on his fancy
wallpaper, a sharp eyed member of the group noticed one shortcut
icon not far above the START button. All it contained was the
letters "MG." Sure enough, this tried and true Lotus
demonstrator, with all the latest file management tools at his
disposal, could not bear to get along without that great Lotus
orphan, Magellan, only a single click away. Be still my beating
heart...maybe there is hope yet.
At the same NICOL meeting a show of hands was asked with
regard to CPUs. A large percentage of the group were on Pentiums
and 486s. Virtually all of the Pentiums were running at least 16
meg of RAM. None of the 486s ran less than 8 meg of RAM. Only a
few retrogrades like me were still running 386 machines. No one
admitted using 286s any more, at least as primary machines.
(Even my government office replaced 30 286 and 386/16
machines with P90s just before they locked us out. They were
486s upgraded to P90, but that's another story. One lawyer
complained that he was one of only two in the office upgraded to
only a 486. I noted that when we laplinked his data to the new
machine there was nothing there--not a single document created by
him. "Does it make a difference whether you don't use a 486 or
don't use Pentium," I asked. He seemed to think so.)
So, clearly, the trend to faster and faster and more and
more RAM. Not much new in that. Even Netscape can't escape the
syndrome. As it continues to work out the bugs in its 32 bit and
16 bit Netscape 2.x betas, it has left behind it's simpler 1.2
version, which while no longer a beta, and preferred by many
users, still had some flaws. Following Microsoft's bigger is
better, all or nothing approach, the software has gotten fat--
and as the corporate management uses the funds generated by the
amazing response to its public offering to purchase other
companies, I just hope it hasn't forgotten it's original vision
and just what made it so popular. Bill Gates has Netscape in his
sights-- the next year will be interesting.
Not everyone is arguing that bigger and faster is better.
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune recently featured
stories hyping the $500 terminal connected to the Internet-
happily downloading applets but keeping its operating software on
servers somewhere out there and storing users files out there as
well. OTOH PC Week included a box on its cover page, week after
week, in which it insisted that the concept of the $500 machine
is dead.
In my view we had the $500 machines and abandoned them
because we wanted more. And we won't be going back. Even if the
software and transmission problems could be solved, there is a
greater obstacle to the dumb terminal approach. The recent
experience of Compuserve users as a result of German censorship
and AOL's embarrassing "breast" incident, combined with the
proposed telecommunications bill's prohibitions on "indecency"
raise significant issues of personal privacy. Quite simply, I
don't want my thoughts stored "out there." Even more important,
I don't want my computer habits to be so easily discovered by
others. My addiction is my own business.
Last summer I said this was the Golden Age of the Internet.
As censorship and commercial interests change the way we use it,
it will never be the same. The online culture has changed
drastically in the past year. Now, the Newbies are the Net.
What will the future bring? Why are you asking me? Heck, I
predicted Congress would never shut down the government.
Copyright 1996, 2003
Originally published at Reflections of a Modemjunkie