Random Newsbytes Tony Waltham From nerds to respected professionals Perhaps the biggest change for us here at Database over the past 10 years has been you - the reader. A decade ago, you were a real computer enthusiast. Today we would call such a person a "nerd" or a "geek". Back then, you knew what you wanted, it was a computer - and a modem, too. Mostly for fun, but it helped at work - or possibly with the homework. A 2400 baud modem also was fine (then), and you were happy to get "online" to exchange tips and trade the latest software on Bangkok's many electronic bulletin boards (BBSes) back in the late 1980s. Today, you are a professional - at work or at play, that is. So much so, that you take more than a passing interest in the hunk of hardware and bundled software sitting in front of you. After all, someone has to. And besides, it is intriguing - the more you learn the more you realise that there is that you don't know. But its both fun and a challenge and the Internet is another horizon altogether. Now, when will there be cable modem access for really high-speed surfing, you might be wondering? It's also true that the computing experience at the keyboard of a PC has been transformed in just 10 years, and generally in an incremental way as everything just kept getting faster, and smaller, and cheaper. Thank goodness for Moore's Law. Unfortunately, we have been let down on the software side. While the hardware got leaner and meaner, the software that was churned out to run on the faster platform became more bloated and - often deliberately, one suspects - resulted on no real net gain for the end user, with arcane and some would say unnecessary features being added for their own sake (not to mention incompatibilities with earlier versions, sometimes.) Today on a Pentium III computer it takes just as long to start up Microsoft Word, which is by far the most popular word processor today for the PC, as it did to start up WordPerfect, Wordstar, or even the version of Word on a 286 back in 1989. And if speed has been a casualty of software bloat, so has the size of the programs. I could carry my entire DOS word processor of 1989 around on a single floppy disk - including the spelling dictionary and the thesaurus. By comparison, the latest version of Word requires over 100 megabytes of hard disk space. If I will be hailing some breakthrough products in this column, I can find few in the PC software arena to excite me, save perhaps for the graphical Internet browser pioneered by Netscape. To that, add Real Audio's Internet Player in the software category. Also, kudos goes to PKware for not fiddling with their Pkzip 2.04g - they finally just come out with a new version, Pkzip 2.50, just last month. The tale of hardware has been a different story, both for the computer itself as well as for the growing range of peripherals that extend or build on that general purpose device that the PC has become. Indeed, if there is one problem that I see today, it is the questions of where to put the PC in the home. Does it go in a work or study area, or should it be in the lounge or recreation area? Should it be integrated with your sound or video system - and where does the Internet belong in the home, anyway? There are many more purposes to which it can be put to... Should you reorganise your home around the PC is perhaps a better questions? If I think back to my PC of 1989, it was a drab little box that mostly munched on text, be it within the framework of a word processor or spreadsheet such as Lotus 123. Online, to many of those BBSes I mentioned earlier, it was the same. There were no fancy graphics, and we used tricks and the weird high-bit ASCII characters if we wanted to be visually creative. The only sound from the computer was the beep from an internal one-inch speaker, usually to remind us something was wrong, and colour was mainly in a choice of a border or a background for an otherwise dreary program. It was the evolution of processing power that enabled the computer to sing and dance, to offer images and even video along with a soundtrack, and as modems became faster and faster, so the world discovered the Internet - and the World Wide Web was born just five years ago, and this for me counts as undoubtedly the most astounding development of the decade. For the Internet had been here for decades. This bit is almost boring, really. Since the late 1960s, more and more computers gradually began talking to each other over ARPANET and NSFnet and later, around 11 years ago, USENET, which was roughly when the Internet started to become truly democratic. But it took the World Wide Web and hypertext in the form of HTML to enable it to take off like a rocket - where it is heading we will not know and cannot say, except "take me there, too." I know I can recall that day - where I was and who I then showed it to _ which must have been back in 1994, when I began using the Lynx text-based browser to explore the Web. Earlier I had experimented with gopher, a relatively primitive tool for accessing information, as well as with search engines with names like Veronica and Archie - which usually returned me details of what I had been looking for. Now I was trying Lynx. I had typed in "lynx http://www.something.com" for I cannot remember where it was, and then I did not know about bookmarks. But it was a site with many links contained in it. Suddenly I was accessing a computer in Cambridge University in England, then I followed a link to Harvard, and then to California, back to Europe, and so on. It was the stuff of Star Trek, with these "journeys" all taking place in a matter of split-seconds, and each offering a wealth of information. I was sold on the Web from that day, although I probably spend more time on the Internet today messing with email and following digests of discussion groups and news summaries that I am interested in. But that's another story. The Internet will change the way we live, work and socialise - as well as how we entertain ourselves, and how we shop. I am convinced it will continue to evolve into a much higher medium, with richer ways for us to interact and convey information - which will also emerge as intranet applications, too. This will trigger innovations beyond our imagination and enable people to do much more than they can do today. I like to think of computer viruses as an example of what the creative (if perverse) human mind can come up with. They date back several years, and are almost as old as DOS and Windows, but, trust me, in the early 1980s the bespectacled guru of PC utilities, Peter Norton, went on record to deny the possibility of the existence of such a thing as a computer virus. He has been proved wrong - many times over - and we continue to see an escalation in what can be achieved in a little bit of mischievous code. I take this to be an example of how innovation can flourish in a network environment. Someone writes some code, then someone else takes this and makes an innovation, "mutates" it somewhat, if you like. I believe that this same network environment that the Internet has created will breed innovation in almost every area of endeavor and what we need next is some collaborative Internet software to enable this. Back to the present, however. The most significant peripheral will have to be the modem, for what it has enabled. Like most peripherals, it predates the decade just gone by, and for PCs the kudos goes to Hayes for introducing the Micromodem 100 that transmitted at 110 to 300 bps in 1979. But by first enabling bulletin boards and then the Internet, the modem has done more than anything to advance the role and influence of the personal computer - and as such is more significant than the wealth of other exciting devices we connect up to a PC. Andrew S. Brove However, in the peripheral category an honourable mention should go to the colour scanner, the CD ROM drive (and read-write technology), printers both ink jet and laser and digital cameras. All of these products, with the exception of inkjets started out as scarcely affordable high-end professional products, but have migrated into the homes of millions. I also suspect that we have scarcely begun to sample the long-term impact of the convergence of audio and video and digital editing around the PC. It would seem that the creative potential in this area is tremendous, but that PCs have yet to shake off their stigma as office-devices-that-also-do-neat-and-useful-things or that having two or three on one home is not being extravagant. Perhaps they need to be made easier to use, or to become somewhat more reliable first. Another highly significant trend is the fact that PCs are rapidly becoming extremely cheap. There has been a lot of publicity about PCs costing less than $500 in the USA, but at the IT Fair last month you could buy a PC here with 32MB of RAM and a 300 MHz processor and monitor for less than 18,000 baht (around US$470) - and that was before the VAT reduction. This is serious price-cutting, and the only constant in PC prices is that what is cheap today will be even cheaper tomorrow. Before closing, may I apologise to Mac users for repeatedly using the term "PC", and I would like say that I include Macs in this category too. Steve Jobs has certainly breathed new life into Apple, but my man of the decade is Andy Grove who has deftly helmed Intel Corp and kept the processors coming out fast and furiously (albeit with AMD at his heels) - and also ensuring that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's law that states that the processing power of a microchip will double every 18 months continues to hold true (and will do for another decade, at least). Tony Waltham is Editor of Database E-mail: tony@bangkokpost.net Back to top