Technology is supposed to be helping us alleviate the burden of repetitive and unnecessary actions by doing the manual work for us. Sometimes that’s well justified but at the other hand, there are times when we wish we had better control over how things are done. The most alarming thing is that most of the users today are accepting the technology as it is. We all curse at hardware or software when they fail to perform the way we expect them to, but how many of us are actually thinking of ways to better it?
Gerald Bumann, our insightful colleague (who currently works as a marketing director for Canon, Germany), once pointed out an interesting fact about loading time of the computers in the 80’s and today. Contemporary computers in fact represent a fundamental step back in comparison to some of the vintage computing platforms such as C64, C128, ZX Spectrum and other less-known machines. Those machines had no moving parts. Take C64 – if you exclude the external additions such as tape drive and floppy disk drive, which leaves you with a bare computer with chips and integrated circuits and a memory card to store the data. Computers today are starting to catch up with the concept by almost re-inventing the solid-state component configurations which are currently overpriced and still in an experimental phase well out of reach of the typical consumer. However, they’re far from what we had in the old days.
The operating system was ready for you one fraction of a second after you flick your computer on. How long does it take to load Linux, Windows, Mac OS? Too long.
Computers today seem to be designed to waste our time by unnecessary loading redundant data and shockingly slow components made by perpetual improvement of archaic concepts. We store information on fragile spinning disks. Our computers run hot like ancient steam machines and they need to be cooled down by fans and we wait for our applications to start. Both money and consumers have been driving the evolution of technology and no great visionary had an overview and control over its natural process so things are inevitably as they are now. With every new consumer computer generation release we’re wowed by their new specs, extra GHz, extra RAM, extra video processing power – all this hype and essentially, still very little performance.
Humanity is still far off from having instant answers to their questions, instant results to their creative input – it makes you wonder how long will it take, and if we will ever reach the technological equilibrium where machines and software are designed so that there is redundant processing power and instant results.
The question to summarise this article is:
Will we ever see the end of the ‘progress bar’?
