Chris' Rant

- by Chris Wenham

The computer industry today is in a really sorry state of affairs. When it should have been out of its infancy years ago it is still, in fact, flubbing up repeatedly and acting like a baby. It thinks it is making advances when it shows off faster and fancier toys, like a toddler building a bigger pile of bricks, but it still hasn't learned any of the basic, fundamentally necessary attitudes to carry it through life -- such as building a pile of bricks that won't fall over with a swish of the hand. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a 50 year old baby we're talking about.

Let's see, moguls love to compare the computer's development with that of the automobile industry, saying that if car technology advanced at the same rate as silicon we'd be driving Chevys that push 20,000 miles per hour and can circle the earth on a 50 cent tank of gas. They fail to say, however, that if auto safety and stability standards kept up at the same rate as those in the computer industry, we'd be slaughtering ourselves in death-mobiles that claim a few hundred thousand an hour.

Or again, just a few days ago I was in a conversation with someone who wanted to brush away Windows 95's tendency to crash as an unimportant thing. "Hey if your car broke down one day you probably wouldn't think it was such a big deal. You wouldn't take it back to the dealer for a refund, you wouldn't write a letter of complaint to the manager of the company, you wouldn't refuse to ever buy that brand again, now would you?"

"I guess not," I mumbled. Now I've thought it over more carefully though; if your car broke down two or three times a week, if the steering suddenly stopped working in the middle of the highway, or the brakes stopped working on your way down a hill, or you pushed the brake pedal and nothing happened until ten seconds later, what then? I betcha that if you came out of it alive you would go back to the dealer and demand your money back, you would write a strong letter of complaint to the manager of the company, and you would refuse to buy that brand ever again.

PC users put up with this every day though. Crashes that happen two or three times a week on average, often more for many Windows users. A mouse that stops working suddenly, a keyboard that goes unresponsive for no reason, or clicking on a menu option and waiting through 20 seconds of disk churning before the instruction is actually carried out, are not uncommon.

Have you ever been watching TV to find the picture suddenly freeze and the next frame slowly appear line-by-line as a light on the bottom glowed and a steady grinding noise came out of the case?

Or have you ever set your microwave for a slow defrost and discover that it strangely kicked into HIGH and ruined your food?

Ever so early in the automobile industry's history, we got cars that were cheap and easy to use, where the most complex part of understanding them were the road laws. Get in, grab the steering wheel, turn the key, shift the gear, push the pedal and it goes. I defy you to find that same simplicity with a modern PC.

The typewriter, like the early auto, was blissfully simple; insert paper, press keys. The PC is ridiculously complex; turn on, wait for boot, click on start, click on programs, click on Microsoft Office, click on Microsoft Word, wait three minutes, start typing, wait fifteen seconds, see your words, type a bit more, select file, select save as, pick a drive, pick a directory, make up a filename, click "OK", click file again, click setup page, select Hewlett Packard LaserJet, pick resolution, pick 600dpi from the list, click "OK", wait for printer to warm up, load the paper, select file, select print, select 'All', click "OK", wait five minutes, watch the document get printed.

BAH!

You buy a PC today and it comes with an awesomely advanced microprocessor (inhibited by a CISC-to-RISC translator wrapper), a massively capacious hard drive (wasted by a file system designed in the late 70's for floppy disks), a roaring fast local bus (retarded by the compromises of an ISA bus it still has to support), and gobs and gobs of memory (swallowed up by dancing paperclips and .wav files of giggling schoolgirls). The operating system it comes preloaded with is a mishmash of 16-bit and 32-bit code that wastes thousands of clock cycles thunking data back and forth and runs terribly on any chip that takes the initiative of actually being optimized for modern 32-bit software. Or you get the industrial strength version of the OS, one that's supposed to be rock solid, but because it was too slow for the current state of affordable hardware the designers had to compromise it and stick the GDI in the Kernel system -- where a bad device driver can blow it all up (hah! Given that you can find device drivers.)

Either way you still have to download and install a new patch every month to fix a security hole that never should have been there in the first place. In the meantime a malicious web page just erased all your data, a hacker just grabbed all your passwords, your neighbor with the same cable modem service as you saw what you downloaded last night, and that 14 year-old punk on IRC has been crashing you daily with an OUT OF BOUNDS packet.

So you buy a Mac, and you've got decent hardware with a decent operating system, but you can't get any new software because the parent company is the lost twin of Commodore and all the developers have fled fearing imminent collapse. (Worse yet, that database guy you saw featured on Oprah keeps threatening to buy out the company every 6 months or so and turn it into a maker of semi-dumb Internet terminals. Woah, gee, there's a booster shot of confidence.)

So you're a user who's fed up with the circus and you want to get something safe. A computer that only breaks down maybe once or twice a year, is as easy to use as an automatic transmission and gets you to all the places you want to go. Sorry, chum, there's no such animal.

And this secluded corner of the world called OS/2 that you thought was a haven is growing scruffy by the inattentiveness of its groundskeepers. It's an exciting and fertile piece of ground but the Kings and Queens never walk here, meaning that nobody grows the really beautiful blooms, and nobody builds the really majestic marble fountains.

And I'm scared -- really scared. Because we are losing what little we've got. We're not able to (or just won't) support the ones who are supporting us. Companies desperately pressed for cash are turning to the only market they think they can get it from, writing off OS/2 as a loss. Don't think the old, "We'll make our money selling Windows software, but keep writing OS/2 apps because you've been so nice to us," line carries any weight. That's a romantic fantasy.

This industry has got to grow up! Chairman Bill Gates is seriously trying to turn "PC technology" (an oxymoron) into the do-all, be-all monster that replaces every server and every workstation on the planet. This is lunacy! Hasn't anybody noticed this? Are we really going to throw away our Indy stations and RS/6000's and replace them with the descendant of a toy that was made as juvenile as possible to prevent it eating into IBM's mainframe sales? Good grief! Someone slap this baby on the bum and knock some sense into it.

I still love OS/2 and I still have it as the only operating system installed on this PC, even though it shares many of the same failings that most other operating systems do. There are just too many reasons for me not to give it up (and I'll talk about some of those next month). But I am really not looking forward to the next 10 years of computing if it's going to stay on the same stupid, wrong-way tracks that I've described. We are going to be fooling ourselves if we think the next faster CPU is going to make us any more productive than we already are.

It's not the chips or bits that matter, it's the attitude, it's the whole design philosophy.

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